


tautology

by milostollbooth



Category: Being Human (UK)
Genre: M/M, that's really all i can tell u about what you're in for, this is the culmination of a years long obsession w this character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-14
Updated: 2020-01-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:00:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 57,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22249066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/milostollbooth/pseuds/milostollbooth
Summary: "You can disconnect it or you can try to glue it all together. He could glue it all together. I could. Who’s speaking anyway?" - Glue, Richard SikenScenes from the (after)life of Nick Cutler.
Relationships: Nick Cutler/Hal Yorke
Comments: 14
Kudos: 16





	1. the part you've braced yourself against

**Author's Note:**

> this fic is me taking the very little we were given of cutler's backstory and running with it. if that sounds good to you then please indulge me by reading and perhaps commenting on what has been my life's work for the better part of eight months. thanks for being here
> 
> chapter titles come from liza forever minelli by the mountain goats

In the days following his making, when he wasn’t coiled on his bed in mental and physical anguish, Nick admonished himself for his stupidity.

The whole thing had put him on edge before he even met Hal: the way the constable had talked about tidying up; the several quiet, well-dressed men who’d been in and out of the station since the arrest without obvious cause for their visits; the fact that Nick had been requested by name. Walking down the corridor to Cell 2 he suffered a chill that he had not experienced since his early days of visiting jails. Three years on the job had numbed that sensation, and he’d been surprised at its sudden recurrence. After, he wished desperately that he hadn’t ignored it.

Seeing Hal for the first time only increased his wariness. Nick was a duty solicitor at a police station. He dealt primarily with misdemeanors and the aftermath of rowdy nights at the pub. His clients were usually dirty or bloody or intoxicated, and many were all three. Hal was none of these things. He wore a well-tailored suit unmarred by blood or grime, and he spoke and carried himself with a precision that Nick had never encountered, not just on the job, but anywhere. He was also, Nick could not help but notice, quite handsome, and for some time Nick clung to this detail as having disarmed him, having given him some miniscule positive impression of the man.

He knew this memory of mixed reaction was a fabrication. When he could recall it with any clarity, Nick knew that the only thing he had felt for the stranger in the cell was contempt. Someone of such obvious status should have his own lawyer, he remembered thinking, should be able to pay out of pocket for some big name and not waste Nick’s time when he had a foot-high stack of files on other clients who couldn’t. He remembered wanting to get out of that cell as quickly as possible, write up whatever shady contract would make this all go away, and get back to his important work. 

The intrigue he felt about why he’d been singled out had not outweighed that deep-seeded dislike enough to make him ask questions the way the man obviously wanted him to. It had not been enough to make him ask what the hell the man was talking about when he inquired about his aspirations. It had certainly not been enough to overcome the panic that set in when he began to realize that whatever he had been chosen for was not a short-term commitment, not a one-off job made unique by the involvement of the son of a magistrate. But the panic came too late. It did not take Nick long after his making realize that he’d been doomed the moment he set foot in a room with Hal Yorke.

Idiot, he berated himself in moments of clarity, before descending back into a delirium he had not yet admitted was hunger.

*

When Hal gave into Nick’s begging that he be allowed to return home after his making, Nick mistook the decision for one made out of compassion. As days passed and he grew weaker, he realized that it had simply been of no consequence to Hal whether Nick stayed or went; he expected him to return eventually. Nick had been a vampire for five days when he began to understand this, and he tried for another two to tell himself that he would not give Hal the satisfaction of running to him for help.

In the end he went for Rachel’s sake. He’d made excuses for his apparent illness to her as necessary throughout the week, but after seven days she insisted he needed a doctor. She was walking out the door saying she’d call theirs when Nick shouted at her to stop, startling them both. Weakly he’d told her not to bother, that he’d go in for a visit, that she need not concern herself. Rachel had narrowed her eyes at him from the doorway and held his gaze for several moments before sighing and telling him to do what he must.

Nick had never asked her what she had guessed or assumed was wrong that week. Theirs was a relationship built on discretion; if one of them said “don’t ask,” the conversation was over, with no lingering conflict between them. The circumstances of Nick’s evasiveness this time were unusual, but Rachel must have decided to trust that he’d had the same good reasons as always for keeping things to himself. In all the rest of the years of his life, Nick would never be able to decide if he thought things would have gone better for her if she’d pushed him for the truth. He hoped it would not have made a difference.

*

It was not hard for Nick to find Hal once he decided to look. Members of Hal’s gang, as Nick thought of it, had been patrolling his house since he returned. It was easy to identify them now that he was- well, it was simple enough to tell who was there to keep an eye on him. After he told Rachel he would go to the doctor he walked down the street and said to the first vampire he saw, “Take me to him.”

Nick was somewhat surprised to find that the place he was taken was a rather upscale bar, but only for a moment. It wasn’t as if he’d had any real notion of where vampires might congregate. After meeting Hal, he felt it was safe to assume they weren’t sleeping in coffins in run down castles, and he had little other than clichés to guide his speculation. 

He did note that the bar was called The Keep, however, so perhaps its proprietors thought in clichés as well. He gave them points for subtlety.

The main room where the bar and tables sat was empty, and Nick was led upstairs to a rather lavishly decorated study. There were floor-to-ceiling shelves along every inch of wall that was not a window, all of them entirely full of books. The only other furniture in the room consisted of two plush armchairs and a sturdy mahogany desk, behind which sat Hal.

“Mr. Cutler,” he said when he saw Nick, and Nick loathed him for the lack of surprise in his tone. “Thank you for bringing him, Fergus.”

He directed this gratitude at the other man, who seemed to take it as a dismissal, because he moved to leave the room. He hesitated in the doorway.

“Anything else you need my lord?” he asked, and Nick understood neither the honorific nor Fergus’ hopeful tone.

“I believe I would have said so,” Hal answered, and Nick heard the door close quickly behind him. 

Hal waited until the footsteps in the hall had faded away before he spoke to Nick.

“You’re back,” he said.

“Don’t think I’ve ever been here,” Nick said.

Hal smiled. He reached beneath his desk and brought up two glasses and a pitcher full of a viscous red liquid that Nick immediately recognized but refused to name. Hal filled both glasses and gestured to the armchairs across the desk. After a moment’s consideration, Nick sat.

Hal slid a glass toward him. Nick stared at it. He wasn’t sure if all of his organs functioned the same way they used to, but it felt like his stomach turned.

“Please,” Hal said, gesturing to the glass and bringing the other to his own lips.

Nick stared. His vision swam as the contents of the glass became his only focus. He felt dizzy. He thought surely there was no way he could be smelling it, but then, he supposed, perhaps he could be. Whether it was real or imagined, the faint scent of metal would not depart from him, and he was reaching for the glass before he realized what he was doing.

He paused with his hand outstretched above the desk, inches from what he badly wished would not turn out to be a source of relief.

Hal said nothing. He watched Nick intently.

Something in Hal’s gaze cracked the remainder of Nick’s resolve, and when he was aware of himself again he was gulping down the blood. He squeezed his eyes shut and did not open them even when he finished drinking. 

“You’ve been struggling,” Hal said.

“A bit.” Nick opened his eyes, aware that it was all but futile to pretend he wasn’t here to beg for help. 

“You’re ready to join us then?”

Nick was not able to stop the shock from showing on his face.

“What?” was all he managed to say.

“Come now,” Hal said, “you’re intelligent. You have to have realized how this ends.”

“I…” Nick said, but he could say no more. He had not considered much beyond the fact that this was the only place he could go, and he tried to maintain his composure as he began to see the bigger picture, but he knew he failed.

“You will join us eventually,” Hal said, “what’s the point of prolonging the inevitable?”

Nick thought about arguing the validity of this statement, but decided against it.

“What…” he said slowly, “what is it that you do?”

“We do many things,” Hal said, “as I believe I mentioned when we met, you are to be our solicitor.”

“Why me?” Nick asked, not realizing until the words were leaving his mouth how much he wanted a satisfactory answer to the question.

“I told you,” Hal said. “I’ve heard a lot about you. You are intelligent. You can be discreet. You have ambition. These are all things we look for in recruits. And you are already employed in the profession we need. You were an obvious choice.”

“I can’t be the only one who fits that criteria,” Nick said. 

Hal paused. His mouth was quirked in the slightest smile.

“No,” Hal said, “I suppose not.”

He looked down for a moment, his smile widening, and Nick hated himself for noticing once again how handsome he was. 

“I suppose,” Hal continued, “I liked you the best.”

Nick did not respond. He was amazed at the man’s ability to make a compliment sound like a threat.

“I don’t want to join you,” Nick said finally.

“Then why are you here?” Hal asked.

Nick did not answer. His gaze drifted to the half full pitcher of blood still sat between them on the desk.

Hal reached for it and moved to fill Nick’s glass again.

“No,” Nick said, jumping up from the chair. “No.”

Hal quirked an eyebrow.

“I shouldn’t have come,” Nick said. “I don’t want to be a part of this.”

“It is not up to you,” Hal said, and Nick wondered if there was anything he could say that would break through the smug, self-satisfied mask Hal wore.

“I won’t,” Nick said.

Hal shrugged. “Go then,” he said. “You got what you came for.”

Although he surely already knew, it took Nick a few seconds to understand what this meant. He felt ill when he realized. He said nothing more, but did his best to slam the door on his way out of the room.

*

Many vampires believed in the importance of fresh blood. It was hardly more than useless, they said, to drink what wasn’t ripe from the kill. Blood stolen from a hospital, for example, could tide them over for a while, and when refrigeration was invented they often kept some around to drink in a pinch, but it lacked whatever was injected into it by a victim’s fear and anguish, and most vampires considered this an essential ingredient.

Nick never found this to be the case. Whether he drank from a corpse or robbed a blood bank, it was all the same to him. He needed it, he supposed, although the nature of immortality required some reevaluation of the definition of “need”. He would not die if he did not drink. He would not die at all, barring a few extenuating circumstances, and this made him particularly resent the effect blood had on him.

From the first time he left The Keep he knew that to ignore his new condition would be difficult, if not impossible. He felt stronger, and his mind was clearer than it had been in days. The dull ache that had enveloped him for a week had disappeared. He felt like he really had been cured of an illness.

Despite this, he was not sure if he could say he actually felt any better. His thoughts were an endless loop of Hal’s voice saying “You got what you came for,” no matter how hard he tried summon anything else, and it quickly became just as dizzying as the craving had been.

Nick hadn’t really known what he had come for, he supposed. Help, he had thought. But that was a nebulous concept, and even before his meeting with Hal he would have admitted, if pressed, that he did not know what kind of help he needed. After, he wished he could go back to not knowing.

He had a vivid sense memory of the blood running down his throat, smooth and warm, and he experienced a wave of nausea when he realized that it must have been fresh. The person it had come from must be nearby, perhaps even in the very building he had been in. He stopped in his tracks, gasping and wondering faintly as he did so if breath was even necessary for him anymore. He ducked into the nearest side street he could find and leaned his head against his arm on the wall of a building. He wondered if vampires could be sick. He gagged a few times almost hoping that he could, as if being able to expel the blood would undo the fact that he had drunk it.

Nothing happened, and eventually his breathing evened out, and he wondered yet again if he continued to operate his lungs out of necessity or just habit. 

When he had calmed down enough to direct his thoughts, he wondered how long it would be before he felt like he had to drink again. He’d walked out on Hal the same way he had the first time, with no intention of going back, but he already felt like just as much of a fool as he had before he came. What would he do on his own? Could he get by without blood? He understood that this was why Hal was content to let him rebel; he believed that no matter what, Nick would always come back. He believed eventually he would have to.

You got what you came for, Nick thought to himself, and tried to pretend he didn’t know that a line once crossed was always easier to cross again.

*

Rachel did not ask Nick what had been wrong with him. She expressed relief that he was feeling better, and if she noticed any change to his mood that outlasted his illness, she did not comment on it, and Nick was grateful for her discretion.

He found that the blood held him over for longer than he had imagined it would; he made it a week without feeling much of a craving for it, and he was almost able to ignore his condition for several days. 

Then, one night while Rachel was preparing dinner, she nicked her finger with a knife.

“Ouch!” Nick heard her exclaim from where he was doing paperwork in the next room. And then he smelled the blood.

He knew for a fact that he smelled it this time, even from a room away; there was no mistaking it. He felt dizzy, like he had when Hal had offered him the glass at the bar. And he knew that what the scent made him feel was hunger.

He was in the kitchen next to Rachel before he knew what he was doing, and she started upon looking up to see him standing next to her so suddenly, then smiled and shook her head.  
“Clumsy,” she said. “Me, I mean,” she clarified when Nick did not respond.

“It happens,” he managed to say, and was overwhelmed in a completely different way when he realized that seeing her face snapped him out of whatever trance the blood had put him in. He did not know what his intentions had been when he came into the room, but he knew after he saw her that there was no way he could hurt her. “Let me help,” he said, hoping that if his relief was palpable to her she assumed it was related to the severity of her injury. 

He led her to the bathroom and helped her bandage her hand, and she flashed him her charming smile and thanked him before she returned to chopping carrots.

Nick looked up at the bathroom mirror and shivered as he always did when he did not see his reflection staring back at him. He hoped Rachel hadn’t noticed.

He hoped also that the ache that settled in his stomach after the elation of his triumph faded wasn’t what it must be. 

*

When Hal showed up at his house, Nick knew he was running out of lenience.

It had been another full week since he’d been confronted with Rachel’s blood, and the hunger had begun to make him feel hollow again. When he was out walking he felt like he could smell anyone bleeding within a one block radius, and a few times he had begun to seek out the source of the sharp iron scent before he caught himself and ran back the way he’d come, dodging confused pedestrians and nearly being hit by cars as he tried to get himself as far away as he could from the agonizing temptation.

When Hal set a glass down before him in the garage he knew he had no chance of refusing.

He jumped when Hal grabbed his wrist. His intense focus was drawn from the blood to Hal’s face. The man’s tone was icy but his expression was calm, and Nick would have called what he felt fear, except that he had felt fear many times in his life, and this was something new entirely.

Did he think deification came without fine print? He didn’t think deification was what he was experiencing. 

He was realizing, however, that it didn’t matter. He wasn’t being given a choice about joining Hal. He’d just been given a grace period to get used to the idea.

So he asked what Hal wanted him to do.

Then they all heard Rachel call his name, and Hal’s cool expression turned to a cold smile, and Nick’s veins turned to ice. 

He willed her to let things be, to let her lenience last longer than Hal’s, to let the secrecy between them save them both. But apparently he’d run out his luck with everyone he knew, because Rachel entered the garage, and Hal was speaking to her, and Nick felt like shouting at her to run, felt like breaking the glass on the workbench and wielding a piece of it as a useless weapon against the vampires, found himself wondering if a wooden stake through the heart was actually what did in people like him and if he had any sharp wooden objects nearby. 

Rachel grinned at Hal’s obsequious compliment in what Hal no doubt thought was a flattered expression, but what Nick knew was an internal laugh at his expense. If the circumstances had been less dire he might have shared her amused glance. As it was, he just wanted her to get out, to step away from this world and never come in contact with it again. He’d leave tomorrow, he found himself promising to no one, or to God, or to whoever might be listening. He’d never speak to her, he’d take the danger he now carried with him as far away from her as he could if Hal would just allow her to walk away unscathed.

She’d barely closed the door when Hal told him to kill her.

Nick’s response was a refusal, but the tone in which he delivered it was a plea.

He ignored the derision Hal spat at him as he walked away, unbothered by it and a little hopeful that if Hal hated him enough then maybe he would be left alone. He gulped down the blood they’d left on the bench and ignored that it was, once again, warm.

*

The morning following Hal’s visit, breakfast was waiting for Nick when he came downstairs. He sighed when he smelled it.

Rachel was sitting at the table with her own plate before her, but her body was turned away from the meal, facing the hallway from which Nick appeared. Her legs were crossed and she wore a neutral expression, and Nick sighed again when he saw her.

“I don’t ask for much,” she began, and Nick held up a hand to cut her off. He was grateful that she obliged.

“I know,” he said, “whatever speech you have prepared, you can give it if you want, but you don’t need to. I know.”

Rachel considered him for a moment. “What is going on?” she asked finally.

“I can’t tell you,” Nick said, “please, I wish I could, but I can’t. It’s better if I don’t. I’m going to handle it. I haven’t been handling it and I know I need to. Can you trust me enough to believe that?”

Rachel took another moment to think about it. 

“Yes,” she said finally, “but I still wish you would tell me. I’m worried about you.”

Nick couldn’t help his somber smile at her words. “I appreciate that,” he said, “you know I do. I appreciate you, and I care about you. And that’s why I’m not telling you.”

Rachel nodded hesitantly, and after another moment during which Nick wondered how many combinations and arrangements of words he could come up with that would amount to “I will not tell you,” she turned her chair to face her breakfast and gestured for Nick to sit.

Nick sighed, in relief this time, and joined her for the food he didn’t need. He would eat it, as he’d been eating everything she’d made for him in the last few weeks despite its lack of purpose for him, and then he would start making plans to leave. He didn’t know yet where he would go, but it had become apparent that he could not maintain his old life, no matter how much of an effort he made.

He was running through potential destinations in his head when Rachel said, “Nate came by yesterday.”

Nick went still with a bite of egg halfway from the plate to his mouth.

“He said he hasn’t seen you in weeks,” Rachel continued, and Nick put his fork down.

“He hasn’t,” Nick said.

“Why?” Rachel said, then quickly, “No, never mind, I don’t ask those questions. He’s worried about you too. At least let him know you’re all right, maybe,” she suggested, then fixed her questioning gaze on him once more.

“If you are all right, that is.”

Nick did not react. Rachel sighed.

“I’ll talk to him,” Nick said, because he did not know what else to say. He wasn’t sure if it was true, and he hated to lie to Rachel, but he did not want to give anything else away, because if she found out what he was planning to do she might well try to stop him. 

“I hope you do,” Rachel said, and Nick was reminded that regardless of his own feelings about doing so, it was pointless to lie to her.

They finished their meal in a companionable silence, and by the time they were clearing up the dishes Nick felt like he almost had a plan.

*

The afternoon following Hal’s visit, Nick received a message. 

A vampire Nick recognized as having been present the previous evening hand-delivered it, and Nick was glad Rachel hadn’t answered the door.

The note was written by a steady hand in elegant, flowing script. It said simply  
_The Keep, one week from tomorrow. Come immediately following the completion of your work duties._ There was a break following the command and then, below, almost as if it had been added as an afterthought, _I do wish to apologize for the intrusion._

Nick looked up from reading the message to see its deliverer still standing on his doorstep, and he nodded a thanks at the man and closed the door without seeing if he left, then leaned back against it and read the note several more times.

He could hardly accept it at face value; Hal’s behavior the previous evening had at no point indicated a person who was not fully aware of and fully confident in what he was doing. In fact, nothing Hal had ever done in the short but impactful time that Nick had known him suggested he was likely to regret or apologize for anything. It was far more likely that the apology was an attempt to placate Nick and prime him for another attempt by the vampires to convince him to join them. Despite knowing this to be the likely motive, the decision was still puzzling to Nick.

After the vampires’ visit to his home, Nick had gotten the impression Hal was done asking and was going to start taking. His planned flight from town was predicated on this belief. If Hal intended him to come to The Keep of his own free will in one week, then it was hardly likely he had plans to take any violent action against Nick in the interim. This meant he had more time to plan with the assurance that Rachel and his family would be safe from the vampires’ wrath. He felt a surge of gratitude at the thought, and then was overwhelmed with dismay that he could feel such emotion for any of them. 

He had not imagined it would take so little time for his expectations to be so changed that he could genuinely appreciate someone refraining from murdering his loved ones.

He wouldn’t let it get worse, Nick thought to himself. He would not forget what Hal truly was no matter how the man tried to manipulate him. He would use the week he had been allotted to detail his plans, and then he would go. He would not consider the loosening of his bonds to be mercy. 

*

At first, Nick hadn’t intended to show up for Hal’s meeting, but in the week he had to consider his plans, he realized that he should. If he disappeared without saying anything, his home would be the first place Hal would look for him, and it did not bear thinking about what might happen to Rachel in that scenario. He was still determined to leave, but he would have to say something to Hal that would lead him away from Rachel when the time came. To do so should be easy enough; Hal knew Nick wanted to protect her, so it seemed reasonable to assume that he would have no trouble believing Nick had left her for her safety.

Nick practiced the simple interaction several times before he went back to The Keep, lamenting that he could not do so in a mirror. All of the vampires made him nervous, but Hal in particular was a presence that clouded his mind, and he wanted to make sure he would not sound like he was lying when he told Hal what was, strictly speaking, the truth: that he would do what he needed to to keep Rachel safe.

When he entered the bar on the evening Hal had requested, a small party was waiting for him. Waiting for him in the sense that they were a part of the scene that greeted him behind the door but, judging from their postures, waiting for him in quite a genuine sense as well. There were two large, rough-looking men sitting on tall stools against the wall at the left of the room, and a few familiar faces, including that of Fergus, to the right. In the center, already recognizable to Nick from his back alone, was Hal.

“Cutler,” Hal said as he turned to face Nick. Nick said nothing. He had never been in a group of this many vampires before. Every time he had practiced the speech he intended to give Hal he had pictured the encounter being far more intimate; now he felt ambushed.

“So suspicious,” Hal said jovially, flashing his sideways smile at Nick. “We’re just pleased to see you.”

Nick might’ve scoffed out loud if he’d been less intimidated. And if he’d had any focus other than keeping himself from flinching as Hal advanced on him.

Nick told himself he would not react no matter what Hal did. He did not know what he was preparing himself for as Hal moved to touch him, but it was certainly not the soft brushing of hands down his lapels and then around his collar, not even a real touch but a suggestion of one that left him missing something he’d never wanted before that moment.

He was relieved when Hal spoke again.

Nick knew there was some sort of fine print that Hal wasn’t telling him about when he promised that the vampires were all right with him not killing. He had noticed the decanter of blood on the bar long before Hal had walked them back up to it, and he had not been in this world long but it had been long enough for him to know that this was what ruled it, and that he would always be an outsider if he could not embrace it fully.

He wished he had the confidence to tell Hal that he knew he was full of shit; that he dealt with the duplicitous on a daily basis, that he lived a duplicitous life, that after weeks of stalking and intimidation he would not be won over by some sort of macabre surprise apology party. He spouted off these admonishments easily in his head, but they came nowhere near his lips.

When Hal poured a full glass before him, Nick’s conviction drifted even further from his grasp.

Nick stared at the deep red in the glass and tried to identify what he felt when he did so. He wanted to drink it; he would not deny that now, even to himself. As certain as he was of this, he was equally certain that he was disgusted by the desire. He knew the blood would slide warm down his throat and he would be unable to ignore that fact, unable to pretend he did not know that there was someone out there, recently deceased, who had paid a tremendous price for his pathetic indulgence. As Hal lifted the glass Nick’s eyes followed, and every second that it sat before him multiplied both his horror and his longing.

It was an attempt to calm his screaming mind when he grabbed the glass and gulped it down.

His stomach sank when Hal started to laugh. It sank further when the other men joined him.

He knew they were laughing at his expense, although he did not know exactly how, but he wanted to upset them as little as possible, so he forced a smile and inquired as to the source of their amusement.

For a moment Hal said nothing, in part because he had not stopped laughing. Nick set the glass down on the bar and let his smile fall; he could not imagine what it was he could have done in the last moment to so tickle them all, but he knew it could be nothing good. When Hal finally regained his composure, instead of speaking, he gestured for Nick to follow him, and the small group entered the hallway behind the bar.

Nick knew the body was Rachel’s before he looked at her face; he would have known it even if it had looked nothing like her, even if she’d been damaged beyond anyone’s recognition. He saw a body, and he knew.

Hal’s next words barely registered. It did not matter what he actually said. In fact, a very long time later, Nick would postulate that he could replace any combination of words Hal had ever said to him with a repeating chorus of “callous” and “cruel” without losing any meaning, although in his next breath he would laugh at himself for thinking Hal could be so easily boiled down.

In the moment, in front of Rachel’s body, Nick fell to his knees.

Hal’s men grabbed him and forced him up, forced him to look at her bloody, lifeless form. When Hal leaned in and spoke to him again, Nick did hear the words. They would be burned into his brain for the rest of his long life. 

I’ve set you free.

For years afterward, Nick would recall this declaration on many a sleepless night and wonder whether Hal had really believed it at all. If Hal really thought that what they had was freedom, or if this had been an empty phrase in service of a theatrical display meant to break Nick down.

He could never be entirely certain which he wanted to be true.

*

Nick had difficulty working out how to feel after Rachel’s murder. There were some emotions he could recognize, that he had names for, and others that he suspected were just familiar ones compounded to levels that he had never imagined they could reach. And there were still others that he likely could have named but very much did not want to.

Guilt overwhelmed him first. He tried desperately to think of a way to correct the situation, even taking a moment to consider turning her, but even if that thought hadn’t nauseated him, it would have been a moot point. It was too late. Hal had wanted her out of the way, so she was gone. Nick felt like an idiot all over again; how had he not realized that Hal would always get what he wanted, exactly how he wanted it?

Grief soon mingled with his guilt. Just because he had not loved her in the way everyone thought he did did not mean he had not loved her at all. He’d loved her very much, since he was very young; they had grown up together. Upon seeing her body he felt his heart break as surely as if they had been a traditional husband and wife, his sadness in no way diminished by the platonic nature of their relationship. He knew from the moment he lost her that there would never be a time in his long life when he did not miss her.

When he came back to himself somewhat, after Hal had moved him away from the body and set him up in a bedroom to rest, Nick began to feel fear. He did not know if or how Hal planned on dealing with Rachel’s family and their friends, but Nick could see right away that when they found out she had been murdered he would be the prime suspect. He’d been behaving strangely, avoiding everyone, slacking in his work; it would require someone with a great deal of faith in him not to at least wonder.

He did not worry about being officially charged with any crime; he had, after all, been recruited to help keep the vampires out of legal trouble. If they didn’t want him to be arrested, he felt certain that he would not be. What bothered him was the thought that anyone he knew might believe he’d done it. What would her parents think? They’d known him since he was a baby; would they think him capable of this? What about his own parents? What about Teresa, whom he was fairly certain was more than Rachel’s best friend? What about Nate?

Nick tried to close his mind to Nate as he had been doing since his making, but after Rachel’s death he found he no longer had the mental energy to maintain this compartmentalization. All he’d been keeping sealed away began to spill into his head, and Nick had the first thought since meeting Hal that he really, truly, felt shame about: some not insignificant part of him was relieved that Nate had been spared. 

*

Through what Nick would come to realize were quite extensive channels that the vampires controlled, Hal arranged for Rachel’s body to be found in an alley. The handbag she would usually have carried with her was found beside her, empty, to give the appearance of a fatal mugging. News of her murder made the front page of several local papers, as nothing so gruesome had occurred so publicly in anyone’s recent memory, and despite most of the public’s purported disgust with the whole affair, it would remain their main topic of conversation for weeks. 

Nick was almost glad to be kept apart from their morbid fascination.

Hal would’ve said “kept” was the wrong word, but Nick was certain it was not. He was allowed to leave the bar because the vampires needed him to work, but he was not allowed to speak to anyone he was not required to, including his family, and he was not allowed to attend Rachel’s funeral. When he raised concerns about how he would continue to live and work in the city that contained all of his family and friends without them at best growing suspicious of his avoidance, Hal brushed him off. It would be taken care of, he said, and Nick should not worry about it. He did, of course, continue to worry about it, but in time it became obvious to him that Hal was right. Somehow they were able to disappear him, to make him anonymous in his own city, at his own job. A few weeks before, he might have wondered and worried about how they’d managed it; now, he was just grateful to avoid being confronted.

He did not object to the specific sleight of being barred from Rachel’s funeral only because he knew he would not have been able to enter the church anyway. Since his making, passing near any sort of holy symbol caused sharp pain to radiate throughout his body, and when he imagined how it might be amplified when he literally stood on holy ground, he knew he could not attempt it. He was more effectively barred from that part of his old life than from any other, so his wife’s funeral became just another reminder that his ties had been permanently cut. 

*

Despite his claim that it was all right for Nick not to be a killer, Hal spent the weeks following this declaration putting him in situations that were clearly attempts to make him one. Nick could feel the man’s frustration growing with each outing that resulted in one of Hal’s henchman finishing the job for him or ended with Nick refusing to drink directly from a body. He would drag Nick aside after every failed attempt to make a murderer out of him and berate him as if Nick were simply being stubborn, as if Hal couldn’t even comprehend that what he was asking for could be difficult or troubling. He made him bury the bodies when he deemed him to have failed, and he reminded him each time he drank that no matter how repulsive he found the act of murder, he was enjoying its fruits.

It was true that every time they killed Nick drank. No matter how ill he felt witnessing the act, no matter how upsetting it was to see other vampires descend on a person and rip out their throat, no matter how many men had to hold back his arms and prop up his head and force him to watch, when it was over, he drank. Watching the kills was when he most felt the vampires’ inhumanity; when their eyes flashed black and they brought out their fangs, he stopped seeing people and saw only human-shaped predators, vicious and terrifying and cold. When he joined them to drink the blood, he felt a monstrous creature stir within himself too. He wished he could make Hal accept that he was tainted enough by this alone.

Eventually Hal made it quite explicitly clear that all he’d said to Nick on the night of Rachel’s death was a lie; that Nick’s ongoing role as accessory to the vampires’ crimes was not sufficient. It was another moment that would live forever in Nick’s memory as if it had always just happened yesterday. There would never be a time he could not conjure up a vivid image of Hal towering over him, blocking what dull light the sky offered on that overcast day, making yet another statement that would have bordered on comically dramatic coming from anyone else, but carried more than enough intimidation when it came from him.

All we require is everything.

You’ve already taken it, Nick wanted to shout after him, what do I have that you haven’t stolen or destroyed?

But it was clear enough what Hal wanted, and Nick knew it was useless to argue with him.

The violence was an ordeal in itself, but as weeks passed another psychological burden weighed heavily on Nick. When he wasn’t being dragged out to murders, Hal invited him to spend his free time in the study, with him, alone. Nick refused these invitations until Hal turned them into instructions, and when he finally did start spending a great deal of time sitting alone with Hal he found himself more conflicted than he had ever been about another person.

Hal had killed Rachel. Hal had made him dependent on blood. Hal kept forcing him to participate in things he wanted nothing to do with. Hal was the coldest, cruelest person Nick had ever met, and Hal had ruined his life.

Hal was also funny, and charming, and intelligent, and interested in many things that Nick was interested in, and willing to discuss those things with him and provide him with reading materials about those things from his extensive private library. When the other vampires taunted and physically harassed Nick, Hal told them off and apologized for them. Nick was not naïve enough to think he did these things out of care or concern, but he was not able to figure out what it was that motivated them instead.

All of Hal’s behavior was impossible to reconcile. Nick tried and tried to make sense of it, but all he ever did was go around in circles until he could not bear it anymore, then try to put the issue out of his mind until he was confronted with it next. 

Nick began to feel like he was driving himself to madness thinking about Hal, and to combat it he started to focus on trying to escape the situation completely. Unfortunately, Hal always seemed to somehow be aware of his private thoughts and intentions, so much so that Nick occasionally feared he could read minds. There was almost always someone waiting to prevent Nick from getting on a bus or train, and often to prevent him from leaving The Keep at all, even the time he tried to get out by climbing down from the third-story window.

One attempt saw Nick actually make it onto a train and get all the way to London, only to find Hal himself standing on the platform waiting when he arrived. He felt like he would cry when he saw that familiar form and the sharp, crooked smile that possessed the potential to convey a thousand different intentions but never, to Nick’s knowledge, kindness.

He thought briefly about running, but he knew Hal would have lackeys waiting to catch him, and he would just be angrier if Nick made a scene in the station. Nick stood a few feet from the spot where he had exited the train for several minutes, making eye contact with Hal but not moving toward him. Hal did not move either, and Nick tried desperately to think of some other way to get out of the situation without returning to Liverpool with Hal, but eventually he sighed, slung his bag over his shoulder, and walked toward him.

They stayed overnight in London in a hotel nicer than any Nick had ever seen in his life. Hal had indeed brought lackeys, including Fergus, who sneered at Nick and then glared at him when Hal told them all to occupy themselves without him for the evening because he was taking Nick to supper. 

The meal was had at the hotel restaurant and included several courses of the most artistically-presented food Nick had ever eaten and a bottle of wine that cost more than he would have been comfortable spending on all of his food for a month in his old life. He was never clear on how Hal had so much money, but he chose not to question it. It was just one of the many things about Hal that was enigmatic to him, and really one of the least troubling. 

Hal spoke hardly at all during the meal, and Nick welcomed the silence and made no effort to break it. After a luscious dessert they were served coffee, and as they waited for their steaming mugs to cool down a bit, Hal finally started a conversation.

“Why do you keep trying to leave?” he asked.

Nick stared. It was a foolish question, and foolish was not a word he thought he would ever apply to Hal. He did not feel like he needed to give an answer. He asked his own question instead.

“Why don’t you let me?”

Hal seemed, for the briefest moment, to be taken aback, but he returned to his calm and casual demeanor so quickly that Nick could not be certain he hadn’t imagined the look of surprise on the other man’s face.

“You are our solicitor,” Hal said, taking a first sip of his coffee too soon and hissing as he lowered the cup.

“Horseshit,” Nick said, and this time he knew he was not imagining Hal’s shock.

“You could find someone else,” Nick continued, emboldened by the fact that he had thrown Hal off even a little bit. “There are plenty of scummy lawyers who would be happy to do your dirty work. I could give you a list of people I went to university with who would jump at the chance to have this life. But you’re wasting your time on me. Why?”

Hal took another sip of his coffee, which was now apparently a decent temperature for consumption, so Nick sipped his as well. Hal slowly turned the mug on the table, moving the handle first directly to his right then directly to his left, as if he could not decide which was a better resting position. He settled finally on the left, then raised his eyes to Nick once more.

“You still don’t understand at all,” he said quietly, and Nick snorted.

“Obviously,” he said, and he was surprised once again when Hal smiled down at his mug. It was not the smile Nick was used to; it took the same shape around his mouth, but it reached all the way to his eyes, and it had a quality Nick had never seen Hal display before even once, although he could not quite place what it was.

“You are not what I expected,” Hal said, “and I am not easy to surprise.”

He raised his still smiling face so that his eyes met Nick’s, and with a start Nick realized what he was seeing that had never been there before.

Warmth.

“You know I requested you specifically,” Hal went on. “I did not do so lightly. I spent months searching for someone I thought would be the right fit.”

“The right fit for what?” Nick asked, now surprised at himself. Most conversations between himself and Hal could only be called that loosely; usually Hal did most of the talking and Nick responded only when necessary.

“It’s difficult to explain,” Hal said. “In the simplest terms, although I loathe to water it down so, I chose you to be my protégé.”

Nick stared. As soon as he heard it he felt like a fool for not realizing it sooner; he had been with the vampires long enough to know that events like his making were not a regular occurrence. He had not, in fact, seen another vampire made in all the three months he had now been with them. He had seen plenty of killing, seen them drink their fill any time they pleased, but he had never witnessed recruitment, and he realized it must be a rarity.

It also made it no wonder, he thought to himself with a bit of an inward smirk, that the others so resented him.

“Why me?” Nick asked, but Hal shook his head.

“I think we should continue this conversation elsewhere,” he said with a quick glance around the crowded dining room. 

When they were sitting on armchairs in Hal’s lavish suite, Nick asked again.

“I told you when we met,” Hal said, and Nick tried to keep the memories from flooding back, but he could not construct a strong enough barrier to contain the deluge.

A history-maker, he heard the Hal of a few months ago say in his mind.

“You have ambition,” Hal said, “and not just for personal gain, like so many of your colleagues. That is what drew me to you.”

“And you thought that made me cut out for this life?” 

“I thought it made you primed for greatness,” Hal said. “I thought- I still think, despite your less than admirable start- that you can be one of the best of us. I meant it when I said I was giving you a gift.”

“A gift,” Nick repeated, incredulous as he had been each time Hal had said some version of the same thing, although less fearful.

“Yes,” Hal said. “I have elevated you to a life you could only dream of before. You will live for a very long time, Cutler. You may well live forever. You can continue these useless attempts to maintain an existence that you are no longer suited for, if you wish. You can fade into the background and minimize your impact, and you can sit back through the centuries and watch the landscape shift around you. Or you can shape it.”

“At what cost?” Nick asked.

Hal smiled again. “One that is not so high as you believe it to be.”

Nick scoffed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Hal raised an eyebrow.

“I am over five hundred years old,” he said. “I have lived through plagues and wars and the rise and fall of empires. I see the world through a lens you cannot possibly yet comprehend, and you would suggest that I lack perspective?”

“Yeah, I would,” Nick said, and it both pleased and disturbed him that Hal continued to smile. “You may have learned a lot in all that time, but you can forget a lot too.”

“You say I forgot,” Hal replied, “I tell you I willfully left behind that which does not serve me well.” 

“And what exactly was it that wasn’t serving you?” Nick asked.

“What is it you believe I lack?” Hal shot back, and Nick realized that they were fully sparring now. He also thought, with a pang, that with the exception of a few key details, this may well have been the kind of conversation he would have had with Nathan, before.

“Compassion,” he answered, “Value for life. Morals. Scruples. Should I go on?”

Hal was grinning again, although this time it was less pleasant than the smile Nick had been granted in the more recent half of their conversation.

“I can see why you think so,” Hal said. “I could argue that I have adapted these traits for a different life, but I know you will not believe I should have done so. All I can say to you, Cutler, is that I hope you will see that what I am, and what you have the chance to become, is a higher being.”

“Or a monster,” Nick shot back.

Hal’s smile then was as cold as it had ever been.

“Are you certain that cannot mean the same thing?” 

Nick stared at Hal again and felt, suddenly, pure exhaustion. Hal must have seen it on his face.

“It is late,” he said, “and we are unlikely to reach an agreement about such fundamentals of existence in one sitting. Rest now.”

Nick was grateful to take his leave. He had almost made it out of the room, was standing in the open doorway focused only on reaching his own suite and what would surely be an exceedingly comfortable bed, when Hal spoke again.

“Good night,” he said, loud enough that it would carry across the room, but only just. Nick fought the urge to turn and see what expression he was wearing.

“Good night,” he said, and wished the door would fall closed faster behind him.

*

After London, Nick stopped trying to escape. This capitulation on his part seemed to elicit a complimentary one from Hal; he began to let Nick go days without being involved in a killing, without having to see where the blood he drank came from, without having to confront this most gruesome part of his new reality.

As a result, Nick had, for the first time in a long time, had an okay week.

It had been days since he’d last been dragged to a kill. He had had several successes at work for people he was genuinely glad to help, and in the evenings he had returned to The Keep and sat down for drinks with Hal; sometimes alcoholic, sometimes otherwise. Nick had grown accustomed enough to the other not to be bothered about which he was offered. Then he and Hal would talk.

He was reluctant to admit it to himself, but he had come to genuinely enjoy speaking to Hal. Certainly there was no one else among the vampires that he could talk to half as well, and as he drifted further from his old life his opportunities to have enjoyable conversations were fewer. With Hal, he often felt he could talk forever. They spoke about history, about law, about religion and mythology and literature. Hal had hundreds of years of experience and perspective to Nick’s twenty-five, and he could offer viewpoints that Nick never would have encountered anywhere else. 

Sometimes, although he felt blasphemous for thinking it, Nick almost wished he could introduce Hal to Nathan.

Each time he had this thought he tried to dismiss it as quickly as it arose, because to think it meant a sharp reminder of the high price he’d had to pay for this new normal. But ignoring the past became easier all the time, and when he was able to do it, Nick continued to find Hal more than adequate company.

They were in the middle of a particularly interesting conversation about the origins of a person’s morality one evening when Hal pushed himself back from the desk and gestured for Nick to stand.

“What?” Nick said, puzzled.

“I think the time is right for us to have a special lesson,” Hal said, and would say nothing more until Nick had risen to follow him. 

Later, Nick would recall much of the night as a blur.

There were details he could fill in if he wracked his brain, but where he always started was a dimly lit room. Hal was there, somehow towering much taller than his five foot ten frame should’ve allowed him to. He was standing at the far end of the same red velvet couch that Nick was planted next to. The rich fabric of the sofa gave way to a deeper red on the end where Nick stood, and somehow his mind always followed that trail as if he were a bystander seeing it for the first time and putting the pieces together, as if he didn’t already know exactly what it was and how it got there.

The spattering of deeper red and brown grew as it neared Nick. It moved from the tops of the cushions to the sides, and then to the floor. There it gathered most significantly, but in Nick’s memory that particular dark stain was obscured by its source.

The body was that of a young man. Nick did not know his exact age, but he assumed it was close to his own. His lithe, athletic frame had crumpled awkwardly between the couch and the coffee table, in a position unpleasant enough to make it clear to any casual observer that he was not resting.

The spatter on the couch matched that on Nick’s suit, and on his hands, and in and around his mouth, and the taste made him want to retch, and he almost laughed out loud at his hypocrisy. As if it was not the same taste it always was. As if he had any right to be upset by that particular detail.

He didn’t know what expression he expected to see on Hal’s face when he finally looked up, but he was surprised that it was a smile; then he realized what it meant, and he felt ill all over again. He managed not to give this away, and it felt like a small victory. He was tired of allowing Hal the satisfaction of his reactions.

“Not quite how I instructed,” Hal said, as if he was trying to teach Nick a household chore.

“Fuck you,” Nick said, surprised at himself and upset that Hal did not seem to be.

“I don’t expect you to recruit often,” Hal said, “or at all, really. It is not something that should be done lightly. But should the situation arise, you must know how.”

“Fuck you,” Nick said again, and he had been prepared to go on, but in an instant his tirade died on his tongue.

He could not tell Hal anything he didn’t already know. He suspected he couldn’t even surprise him with the fact that he knew those things himself. He felt quite suddenly the way that he had the day he’d seen Hal across the train platform in London; outplayed. Always at least three steps behind. Always clawing at a lifeline being offered by the very person he wanted to escape from. Always climbing up out of a pit only to get near the top and begin to make out Hal’s face smiling down at him. 

In the time that he’d been with Hal he’d grown to relish his ability to surprise the man, and even that was beginning to wane.

The victim Hal had selected was a small-time MP who, despite his youth and inexperience, had begun to make waves among his colleagues and the British populace, even making national headlines once or twice since his election. A consensus was growing that he was someone to watch out for. It was a brilliant choice, Nick thought grimly. If recruited, he would offer the vampires access they were currently lacking to the political world. Murdered, his face would appear on the front page of newspapers for weeks, perhaps even months to come, haunting Nick everywhere he went.

A success for Hal either way.

“In order to recruit you must learn not to get carried away,” Hal said, and Nick snapped his head up and glared.

He would not explain himself; he knew there was no need. But the implication that what happened was a result of insatiable bloodlust was an attack on his character that was difficult for him to let go. Hal knew it, which was why he said it, which was why Nick would not allow himself to respond, no matter how badly he wanted to.

It had all happened so fast, undoubtedly according to Hal’s design. They were meeting with the man as representatives of an organization interested in supporting some initiatives he was pushing for in his home region. Nick had been nervous, but not he was not certain what their real purpose was, and he was aware that it was futile to ask Hal questions or try to talk him out of whatever it was they were doing. 

They had barely said hello to the man, had only just been ushered into his finely appointed study, when Hal attacked him. 

He tore into his throat once, quickly, leaving a wound that would perhaps kill him within the hour but certainly would not instantly end his life. Then Hal let the man fall.

The young politician sat gasping against the couch, his wound consistently spurting blood on the fine upholstery. He looked first at Hal, with an expression of confusion, panic, and incredulity, and when he got not so much as a reaction he turned to Nick and shifted his expression to pleading.

“He must drink from you,” Hal said calmly, and Nick remained frozen on the spot, staring into the dying man’s frantic eyes.

“He must drink,” Hal said again, his tone incongruous with the situation.

Hal watched Nick remain statuesque for another moment, then he sighed and began to roll up his own sleeve.

This was the motion that spurred Nick to action.

The realization of what was about to happen, of what Hal was going to make him party to, sent him back to the cell where they’d met, back to the weeks writhing in pain on his bed, back to the desperate desire for blood and the intense self-hatred that overtook him when he gave into it. To the growing awareness that his life would be this way forever, and that forever now encompassed an amount of time he could barely fathom. 

He’d thrown himself on the man and begun to drink.

He felt Hal back away as he did so, and when he finally rose, after allowing the dead man’s body to collapse to the floor, after staring at the remnants of what he had done, he looked up and saw that smile, and realized he’d been tricked into playing a game he could only lose.

What purpose would there to be to telling Hal he’d only killed the man to prevent this fate worse than death? How much did that even matter? When he’d done it, had he not drunk his fill? Had he not reacted to that now-familiar sensation of warmth down his throat with something like relief, even enjoyment? Was there not a part of him that was glad now to be sated?

So he wouldn’t have done it otherwise. He realized with grim acceptance that that did not matter, and Hal knew it. Nick saw the past few weeks of leniency in a new light. They had not been leniency at all, but an attempt to lull him into feeling secure, so that he would be completely unprepared for the next ambush. And Hal had succeeded. He had proven that Nick could be forced to kill, that in his new life there was no deserting and there was no conscientious objecting, no path forward for him that did not involve being exactly what Hal wanted him to be.

He was defeated.

He allowed himself a few quiet moments with the revelation. It felt like the briefest period of mourning.

When he could dwell no longer, he met Hal’s eyes again and found the man waiting for his next move. Nick held his gaze for long enough to feel like the contact was a show of strength, then gestured to the corpse at his feet.

“What do we do about this?”

*

Nick did not necessarily recognize himself as having undergone a massive shift after the murder of Peter Winston. The changes came to him slowly over time, in the form of isolated realizations that his feelings and his behavior were alien to him. They came at moments like one several weeks after the murder, when Nick saw yet another headline about the fruitless search for the bright young MP’s killer plastered above an image of the handsome, charismatic man smiling, glowing with life, and realized he did not feel overcome with horror. He stared at the man’s face in grayscale, waiting to feel the inky eyes boring into him with accusation, demanding his guilt, but the onslaught never came. Nick stared for several minutes more, so long that another passer-by stopped next to him and made an idle comment about how terrible a tragedy it was, which he responded to with a weak platitude and without looking at the other person’s face.

Going out for hunts felt different too. He was not often pressured to participate in the murders anymore, in part, he suspected, because other members of Hal’s gang considered their own fun spoiled when they didn’t get the pure experience of the kill. This remained more than acceptable to Nick; what changed was the lens through which he viewed their actions. For months he had witnessed one killing after another, each as brutal as its perpetrator could make it. For months these encounters had made him ill, had made him sweat, had filled him with images that came back to him in his dreams and woke him in a spasm of terror and anguish. 

Now, he watched with not much more than mild disinterest as Fergus tore out the throat of a young girl who’d served them all tea that morning in a rural café. He watched the life drain from her with a detachment he had not known he was capable of, and he watched Fergus’ fangs rip her open without any awe, without any alarm, without any fear. As Fergus drank and some of the others bickered about who would go next or who would choose the next victim, it occurred to Nick that his impression of these men as fearsome predators had been faulty, at least in part; they were not so frightening or powerful as that image implied them to be. What he’d got right, he thought as he watched a man called Ryan get in a push fight with Fergus over the corpse, was that they were no better than animals.

*

It was, of course, Hal who continued to deny categorization.

With the conquering emotions of fear and disgust fallen to the wayside, Nick was able to pay much better attention to Hal’s behavior, which only became more and more fascinating to him.

Hal never killed with the others. He came with them on occasion when they indulged their own proclivities, but he never took a life, never even drank directly from a body in front of them. Sometimes, such as the time they went to a sheep farm in Wales and took out the entire family inhabiting the farmhouse, he left the other men to their own devices and disappeared by himself with one of the victims. No one questioned this, Nick noticed, and no one ever followed him.

On the occasion of the Welsh farm, Nick broke this unspoken rule. 

He slipped quietly from the drawing room, where the other vampires were indulging in the kills of the father and the three young children of the house, and made his way up the stairs, certain there was nowhere else Hal could have gone. 

He found him in the largest bedroom, shirtless, sitting beside the body of the mother. 

While Nick’s fear of the other vampires had morphed fully into disdain, he still felt wary of Hal as much as he felt drawn to him. When he entered the room, he had a moment of panic about how Hal might react to his presence, and as he was making the decision to take his leave as quietly as possible, Hal noticed him and smiled.

“Cutler,” he said, “tired of passing time with the provincials?”

It was only with Nick that Hal referred to the other vampires in such disparaging terms, and it made Nick feel more important than it probably should have.

“A bit,” he admitted, and Hal gestured for him to come fully into the room and close the door. Nick did so.

Hal’s face and chest were bloody, and Nick was impressed by how dignified he managed to look despite this. Killing always seemed to foul the other vampires; it certainly felt to Nick as though it fouled him. On Hal, the debris of violence looked sharply elegant. 

As was often the case when they were alone together, Hal waited for Nick to start a conversation. 

“You never stay with the others,” Nick said, gambling that to point out this obvious fact would not upset Hal.

“No,” Hal said, and seemed to consider for a moment if or how he wanted to explain.

“They are each effective at the things that they do,” he began, “but their individual scopes are very limited. This is not true for me.”

Nick said nothing, trying to ignore the fact that the internal battle that was always waged within him in these situations between his hatred for Hal and his fascination with him, his immense hurt and his burning desire for the personal connection that he had been stripped of, was lasting for a shorter and shorter time on each occasion.

“I am a leader,” Hal said, “I am responsible for all of their responsibilities as well as some that are unique to me. This has man implications for how I interact with them. I decided long ago that I would distance myself from them in killing in service of my role.”

“How does that serve you?” Nick asked. 

“They don’t see me as one of them,” Hal said, “and they can have a healthy curiosity about how I handle myself in private, knowing that their questions will never be answered.”

Nick considered this for a moment. “You let me in,” he said, and Hal grinned.

Nick was still standing in the middle of the room, his hands in his pockets, having not been able to decide where it was most appropriate for him to situate himself when he entered. Hal seemed to notice this, and gestured to the bed. Nick’s incredulity must have shown on his face, because Hal smiled and gestured again, and Nick moved to sit as lightly as he possibly could in the only available space: the edge of the bed opposite Hal, next to the corpse. This was how he became aware that the corpse was not a corpse at all.

He jerked away from the dying woman, but immediately felt foolish for it. Although her shallow breaths made it clear she was still alive, it seemed very unlikely she was aware of that fact, or of anything at all; her eyes were glazed over, and she did not move or indicate in any way that she was conscious.

“Why?” Nick asked, and he was not sure exactly which part he wanted clarified, but Hal was not troubled by his lack of specificity.

“It loses something immediately once their life has gone out,” Hal said. “It diminishes further and further the longer they’ve been dead, but there is a lack from that first moment. You must have noticed by now that what we drink from a glass feels less potent.”

Nick did not point out that he got little enjoyment out of drinking blood regardless of the specifics of how he did so. He did it to fulfill a need, although he had understood from the start that it was much more than that for the rest of the vampires.

“I like to keep them alive for a while when I can,” Hal said, “enjoy the experience for longer. The others are not so discerning; I doubt Fergus could manage to take his time if I told him to.”

“And you don’t want them to know what you do because being mysterious keeps you in control?” Nick questioned.

“Yes,” Hal said.

Nick waited to see if Hal would address the obvious of his own accord, and when he did not, Nick forced the subject.

“You let me in,” he said again, and again Hal smiled, the expression evoking more and more conflicting and intense reactions in Nick each time it was directed at him.

Hal gestured to the dying woman between them.

“Would you like to join me?” he asked, and it was without much consternation that Nick said yes.

*

It was just short of miraculous, really, that Nick managed to avoid seeing Nathan for as long as he did.

That he no longer lived at his old house was helpful; that his schedule was unpredictable and inconsistent was a boon as well. He made an effort to get any information he could through his work about where Nathan would be at any given time. He tried to know what cases he would be working, what court appearances he had to make, so as to never cross paths with him by accident or allow himself to be cornered during the day. They tended to work in different areas, and thanks to luck and diligence, Nick managed not to see him for almost eight months.

It wasn’t until his luck ended that he realized he really had begun to hope that it could last forever.

Hal was taking Nick and a select few other vampires to meet with a contact of his about a topic he had not disclosed to them before the meeting. This was odd, and Nick was slightly worried that he had been told no more than anyone else, because Hal usually kept him abreast of any dealings that might require his legal expertise. It was possible, he supposed, that he had not been informed because there was no legal risk involved in the situation, but that did not make Nick feel much better.

It was because he was distracted by his worry that Nathan saw him first.

The vampires were approaching their table when they all turned to look at the man who had shouted, “Nick!” and was now making his way toward them briskly.

“Nathan,” Nick said, after considering and then dismissing the idea of pretending not to know him. “How are you?”

Nathan stared at him. Nick tried not to cringe under his gaze. He glanced desperately around the room for a reasonable location where they could speak in private. 

“Let me get you a drink,” he said quickly when he spotted a sparsely populated corner of the bar. Nathan looked confused, but he took the hint.

“Sure,” he said, stepping to the side so Nick could lead the way.

“A moment?” Nick directed the question to Hal. Hal smiled and nodded, then led the others to the table where a man, presumably their contact, was already seated. Several of the party looked back at Nick with some curiosity mixed into their usual contempt, but they all quickly turned their attention to the mysterious meeting they were all no doubt thrilled to have been considered important enough to be included in.

Nathan allowed Nick to lead him to two corner stools and sat down beside him before his mask of calm fell away.

“What the fuck?” he said.

“I know,” Nick said.

“You know?” Nathan said. He kept his voice low, but the rage it contained was palpable.

“I know,” Nick repeated.

“And?” Nathan said, “Where the fuck have you been?”

“Work, mostly,” Nick answered truthfully.

“Don’t do this,” Nathan said, “fucking don’t.”

Nick said nothing. Guilt and shame were fighting to reel in a part of his heart that was, against all good sense, soaring at the sound of Nathan’s familiar melodic lilt.

“Why?” Nathan asked, and Nick wished he understood how loaded the question was.

“After Rachel,” he began, and Nathan interrupted him.

“Bullshit,” he said, “don’t shove this off on her. Jesus Nick she’s dead, I never even saw you, you didn’t come to the funeral! She’s dead, and you just disappeared.”

“Stop,” Nick said, wincing as if he’d been struck at each repetition of “dead”.

“Then tell me what happened,” Nathan said. His voice was softer now, as if perhaps his outburst had given him some release.

Nick thought about answering truthfully, or even half-truthfully. He thought about the way things might play out if he told Nathan this or that variation of the real story. He thought about how Nathan might react, and how he might react in turn, and how Hal might react when it all got back to him, as it surely would.

He did not have to think for long to know how he had to proceed. 

“Tell me,” Nathan repeated, and Nick wished he had not paused long enough to make him hopeful.

“I can’t,” Nick said, so quietly that he was afraid Nathan wouldn’t hear him.

“You can,” Nathan replied.

“No,” Nick said, louder and more firmly. “No, Nate, I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you, I’m sorry, I wish I could, I didn’t want any of this, but I can’t tell you, I can’t, I’m sorry…”

He trailed off and tried to swallow the lump in his throat.

Nathan seemed to sit with the nothing Nick had given him for several minutes before he spoke again.

“Are you in trouble?” he asked. “’Cause you know we can deal with it, Nick, Jesus-“

“No,” Nick interrupted.

“No what?”

“Just. No.”

Nathan gave him more time to think, as if he believed the right amount of consideration would allow Nick to reach a point where he had the words to tell him what was going on. Nick hated that he could not satisfy his hope.

“I can’t,” he said again, and this time Nathan sighed.

“You can’t,” he repeated.

Nick nodded.

Nathan glanced back at the table where Hal and the others seemed to be in deep discussion with the man they’d come to meet.

“Who are they?” Nathan asked.

Nick met his eyes and said nothing.

“You can’t,” Nathan said, and Nick nodded.

“Nick…” he said, but Nick cut him off.

“We can’t see each other again.”

“And you can’t tell me why.”

“I can’t,” Nick confirmed, staring down at his hands.

“You know I’m not a fool,” Nathan said.

“I know,” Nick said, “of course I know.”

Nathan glanced back at Hal’s table again, and Nick sent up a thanks to whatever entity watched over him these days for the fact that none of them were paying him any attention.

When Nathan turned back his face was almost all concern, and Nick wished he could say anything at all to reassure him, but he had decided without even realizing it that he would not lie to Nathan outright. He remembered, with a physical pain in his chest, having a similar thought about Rachel.

“I could help you,” Nathan said.

Nick smiled. “No you couldn’t.”

A heavy silence hung between them for what felt like a lifetime.

“I could try.”

“I don’t want you to.”

“What if I want to?” Nathan said, some of the fire returning to his voice, and Nick shook his head. After a pause he leaned in close to Nathan’s ear and lowered his voice as much as he felt he could.

“If you’ve ever loved me,” he whispered, “you will let this go.”

Nathan’s face told him he had achieved his desired intensity.

They stared each other down for several moments more. Finally, it was Nathan who sighed.

“All right,” he said, and Nick realized just how tense he had been when some of his worry seeped out of him at the acquiescence.

“Thank you,” he said, “Nate, thank you.”

Nathan did not respond.

“I should…” Nick said finally, rising and gently indicating the table where Hal was seated.

“Right,” Nathan said. He did not look up.

Nick very suddenly and very desperately wanted to end the conversation any other way, consequences be damned. He wanted to sit back down and tell Nate everything. He wanted to ask him to run away, as if there was any chance they wouldn’t be followed and killed, or worse. He wanted to drag him out the nearby back door of the building and kiss him against the wall in the alley and never stop, and go back home with him and ignore all the retribution that would come at them from all sides no later than the very next morning.

He indulged the impulse with the lightest brush of his fingers against the back of Nate’s hand as he walked away. The gesture was so insignificant that Nick felt afterwards it might actually have made him feel worse.

Nathan did nothing, and he did not watch Nick go.

“Cutler,” a familiar smooth voice said as Nick approached the meeting he’d come here to have. “Finished chatting to your friend then? Good. Have a seat.”

The empty spot indicated was directly next to Hal. Nick did not have to see Fergus’ face to know he was glaring.

“Thank you,” Nick said, straining to keep his voice steady. “I’m sorry for the interruption. What are we discussing?”

Hal smiled. “We,” he said, “are moving to Cardiff.”

*

Nick had missed the conversation that explained why the vampires in Cardiff were in need of leadership, and why Hal had been chosen for the role, but in the moment his considerable distraction prevented him from being very concerned with the details. 

He paid little attention for the rest of the meeting, only nodding or murmuring in agreement when it seemed appropriate. It was not until much later in the evening, in Hal’s study, between bouts of grief at his loss, which now felt fresh once again, and relief that it seemed he had been able to spare Nathan any involvement, and unpleasant ache at how much less intense the grief actually was than he felt like it should be, that one sharp thought broke through his miserable fog; of all the emotions attempting to smother him, one that was markedly absent was anger.

Nick looked up and watched Hal reach under his desk for a bottle of brandy. He took in the smooth lines of Hal’s face and the sure, steady motion of his hands as he poured and he tried to feel hatred, tried to feel fury, tried to want to yell at Hal or hurt him or leave him, but he could not fuel any reaction so intense, and his attempts left him with a dull ache whose source he could not identify.

He had not questioned the move to Cardiff, he realized rather suddenly. When Hal said they were going he had not thought about trying to refuse, not considered trying to find an opportunity to run, not even bristled at his automatic inclusion in the “we”.

“We are moving to Cardiff,” Hal had said, and several hours later Nick was realizing that he had no objection. He would go to Wales, and if Hal said they were going somewhere else, Nick would go there too, and he was not angry, he could not be angry, and he knew these two independent realizations were not actually independent at all, but they felt grounded in such disparate emotions that he did not know how to reconcile them, so he spoke to Hal instead.

“Why do they need you in Cardiff?”

Hal looked up from his drink.

“Ah yes,” he said, “you missed that while you were chatting with your... who was that?”

“Just a colleague,” Nick said, not sure if he was grateful for or troubled by the fact that the lie slipped easily from his tongue.

“A colleague?” Hal questioned.

“Hadn’t seen him for a while,” Nick said, “that’s all. So he wanted to catch up.”

Nick held Hal’s gaze. It did not matter if Hal saw right through what he said; it only mattered that he did not give up saying it.

It was with some satisfaction– and a confusing pang of regret that Nick hoped he would not feel compelled to revisit– that he sensed Hal decide to drop the subject.

“There has been an… incident,” Hal said as he came to sit in the chair next to Nick. “With the vampire who was running things there.”

“Is there one of you everywhere?” Nick asked.

“They are not all like me,” Hal said, “which is why I was asked to step in.”

“How do the vampires there feel about that?”

“I am sure some will resent me because they hoped they would rise in the ranks themselves. But they won’t make trouble.”

“You seem pretty confident about that,” Nick said. 

“I am an Old One,” Hal said, in a tone that suggested to Nick he should be impressed.

“A what?” he said, hoping he displayed none of the desired awe. He almost grinned when he saw a flash of annoyance in Hal’s face.

“I forget you know so little still,” Hal sighed, taking a significant swig of his brandy.

“The Old Ones,” he said, “are. Well. I suppose you could call us the vampire elite. We command a certain amount of respect.”

“Just ‘cause you’re elderly?” Nick quipped, triumph swelling in his chest when he saw Hal grin.

“You may not think it is much of an accomplishment for a vampire,” Hal said, “but you will come to understand. Case in point: the man I will be replacing in Cardiff.”

“What happened to him?”

“Politics, as far as I understand,” Hal said. “That’s what does in many of us. And why they want me specifically. A void of power always causes problems. If I don’t step in, things could get much worse before they get better.”

“But you’ll solve it,” Nick said, “because they’ll listen to you. Because you’re…” Nick paused and noted with surprise that he had never actually asked. “How old are you?”

“Five hundred and twelve.”

“You don’t look a day over a hundred and forty.”

Hal snorted. “Delightful,” he said, “I’ve never heard that one before.”

“You’re laughing at it,” Nick shot back, which granted him another smile.

“Five hundred and twelve huh?” he said. “When do you become an Old One? Three hundred or so?”

“It’s not merely about age,” Hal said, “although most of us who make it this far do so because we have the qualities that define an Old One.”

“Which are?”

“Leadership, for one,” Hal said. “Most of us earn our place by not ending up like that idiot in Cardiff.”

“Leadership prevents that?”

“Good leadership helps you stay a leader,” Hal said, “not just because people follow, but because you know when they aren’t and you put a stop to it.”

Nick filed this statement away as one to be argued about some other night.

“The man in Cardiff didn’t,” he continued instead.

“He did not,” Hal confirmed.

“Okay,” Nick said, “so you live a long time and you’re a good leader. Then what, the vampire government rings you one day and tells you you’re in?”

“Not the government, per se,” Hal says, “and initiation is a bit more formal than that. But essentially, I suppose, yes.”

Nick considered this. He had not thought much about vampires beyond the small circle he’d been brought into. With the news of the conflict in Cardiff and now the knowledge of the existence of the Old Ones, his perception of the scope of “vampire politics”, as Hal referred to it, had to drastically expand.

“How many are there?” he asked eventually. “Old Ones, I mean.”

“Some twenty to thirty at any given time,” Hal said.

“Wow,” Nick said, “you really don’t last.”

“Most do not.”

“Are all the other Old Ones like you?” Nick asked, “leaders in someplace or other?”

“Some are,” Hal said, “but in maintaining my post here I am actually something of an outlier. Most of the Old Ones live together in some castle or manor house. They keep an eye on things, but they don’t interact too much with the public.”

“Why do you?” Nick asked.

“I have little interest in taking up what would amount to retirement,” Hal said. “I have more to offer as a part of the world.”

Nick wasn’t sure why he laughed at that, but he did, surprising Hal yet again. He tried to stop, but once he started it felt like his outburst contained all the stress and pain and fear and confusion he’d experienced in that long, long evening, and that if he only allowed it to continue he might be unburdened. He gave in, dissolving into a fit that lasted for several minutes, during which time he was only vaguely aware that Hal was laughing with him.

When Nick was finally just chuckling softly and wiping a tear from his eye, Hal was pretending to be offended.

“I always assumed your hesitance to employ my honorifics was born of a distaste for formality. Are you really so amused by the suggestion that my role is valuable?” 

His heavy tone was betrayed by the quirk of a smile at the corner of his mouth.

“Not at all,” Nick said, “my lord.”

Hal grinned and poured them both another drink.

*

They drove to Cardiff at night in Hal’s 1946 Vauxhall, just the two of them. It started raining just outside Liverpool, and as they put distance between themselves and the evening glow of the city the world took on a sheen from the car’s headlights. The landscape in the countryside without the light of moon or stars was so devoid of even the subtlest night colors that it created the impression that they were traveling through a shining tunnel of black, pressing ever further into a void.

In the liminal space the effect created, Nick had time to think. 

He had spent much of the last few days trying to avoid thinking. Hal had not raised the subject of Nathan again, to Nick’s immense relief, but this meant that Hal had not provided Nick with any new catalyst to access his old self-righteous fury, so he continued to be unable to feel it.

It was odd, to be upset about not being angry. To be bothered that such negativity seemed out of reach. It was a further difficulty to handle the knowledge that this state of being was not new; that his encounter with Nathan had not brought about some change in his person, only made him aware of one that had already taken place. One that meant a not small part of him was glad that he was on his way to a new life and that he had Hal as his one bridge between the past and the future.

Nick did not think he had lost sight of Hal’s worse traits. He would not hesitate to label many of his actions, even core aspects of his personality, as monstrous. He certainly had not forgotten the personal offenses Hal had committed against him; but, as evidenced by his mild attitude in the wake of seeing Nathan, the hatred that the memory of these events should have conjured was inaccessible to him. He was able to think the phrase, “Hal killed Rachel,” but the emotional response he expected of himself never came. When he tried to get to it, he felt like he brushed up against the edge of a murky landscape in his mind that he could not see into, which stood opposite a chasm too deep and wide for him to cross, trapping him between two obstacles, so that although he knew that within that oppressive mist remained his grief and anger and hatred and the memories of the events that were their source, he could neither find them nor completely abandon them.

He knew that this predicament, too, was ultimately of Hal’s making. He did not care.

A monster and a higher being might be one in the same, Hal had claimed once, and Nick still could not count the notion as anything other than self-aggrandizing and conveniently vindicating. But if Hal was exactly as despicable as Nick had always believed him to be, what did it mean that Nick no longer despised him?

What does it say about you, he kept asking himself, that you can know a monster for a monster and not hate it? 

In his state of turmoil Nick clung to the one feeling he had that made sense to him: his gratitude that it seemed as though Nathan would be spared not only his life, but any involvement in the dangerous world Nick had inadvertently brought near to him. If he could be glad that Nathan was safe, that Nathan was relatively unscathed, then surely he must still possess some sort of functioning moral compass.

Perhaps, over time, he was just adjusting it to a new axis.

Every concession he’d made to Hal had come at a point when he felt he had no other choice. What should he have done, he wondered, posing the question to both himself and the universe at large, when confronted with horrors that he could not stop, that he could only, at best, negotiate his role in? Should he have tried to stop them anyway? Should he have thrown himself into the fray, added his own corpse to the trail of bodies his new companions left behind them?

Nick had already died for nothing. Who would it serve if he did it again?

The world did not turn the same way it used to, and he would get nowhere by conducting himself as if it did.

Perhaps, he thought, he simply had not fully realized what it meant to adapt. 

He watched Hal watch the road and thought about what might await them in Cardiff, about what their life might look like. As he tried to sharpen the edges of this vision, he wondered for the first time in a long time, and for the first time without an immediate reaction of intense fear, what it was Hal ultimately expected of him. 

“What is it you want me to be?” Nick asked over the din of rain on the roof of the car. 

“Explain your question,” Hal replied.

“You know,” Nick said, because he felt certain that Hal did. “You said you brought me on to be your lawyer. That’s bullshit and we both know it. Then you told me I was your… protégé, or whatever. But back in Liverpool you never really… well. It seems like there’s more to it than that. So what is it?”

Hal smiled. “You are learning from me, aren’t you?”

“Sure,” Nick said, uncertain if that was how he would most like to describe what went on in their relationship, but unwilling to belabor the point.

“You keep learning,” Hal said, “and you see where you go. You are bound to become someone. The only question you have to answer for yourself now is how are you going to make your mark?”

A few months earlier, Nick knew this answer would only have terrified him; it resembled too closely the history-maker speech Hal had given him on the night they met. He might have felt it was untrue, like it was Hal trying to drive him toward some end that was not his own. He would not have been able to find any hope for himself in the vague aspirational spiel. 

He was not surprised at how little of his fear and suspicion remained.

The world had changed around him, and on that rainy night outside Cardiff Nick’s consciousness finally reached the conclusion his subconscious had arrived at long ago; that the best thing he could do was change with it.

*

When they arrived in Cardiff, it seemed that Hal’s predictions were correct. The other vampires, whether enthusiastically or grudgingly, did accept his position as their leader. 

Hal set up residence in the end unit of a set of rowhouses, which Nick felt was a bold choice considering the proximity to their neighbors. It turned out this was not to be a concern, because the next home over housed the chief of police who, just like the one in Liverpool, was aware of the vampires’ presence and helped to keep them hidden when necessary.

For a few weeks or so, Nick thought the transition had been pulled off without a hitch. The Welsh vampires were not so different from Hal’s crew, whatever they wanted to think, which meant that Nick had no love for any of them, but he was accustomed to the isolation of his new life, so he was not particularly troubled by this. He still spent the majority of his time with Hal, and with new routines and connections to establish he was brought into Hal’s day to day activities more and more. He met the police chief himself, and though every part of who he was or had been meant that he loathed the man, he knew it was an honor to be permitted to join in these exchanges, and the inclusion meant a great deal to him. He assisted in the installation of new personnel to run the vampires’ business in Cardiff which was, almost unbelievably, a funeral home. Nick was delighted when Hal shared a pointed look with him when they first stepped into the place, and glad that he was not alone in thinking it a thoroughly absurd endeavor. 

He spent evenings, as he had done for months now, with Hal in his study. Hal’s personal library had been delivered, and Nick continued making his way through not just the law books that were new to him, which Hal had requested he familiarize himself with, but any other volumes that caught his interest as he browsed the extensive selection. He felt like he had read more in the past year than he ever had in his life, even at university.

Nick realized, around the beginning of their fourth week of residence in Cardiff, that he could, without hesitation, call himself content. The regular killings he was still required to participate in remained distasteful to him, but because he was now almost always invited to join in with Hal and leave the others behind, there was a part of him that took pleasure even in those moments. He still did not think he would ever enjoy the act of murder, or of drinking from a fresh corpse, but he was beyond refusing to admit that he very much enjoyed being special to Hal.

It was this surprising measure of peace that made it all the more upsetting when his new beliefs were tested.

*

They had been in Cardiff for a few weeks when Hal began to behave unusually. Although he would not admit it, he was on edge. He snapped at Nick regularly, and although he always eventually apologized, he did not explain himself, and a few hours later it would happen again. 

One day Hal requested that Nick bring him every newspaper or news bulletin he could find in the city, and after Nick diligently spent several hours traipsing around Cardiff gathering papers and trying to keep them out of the day’s constant light rain, Hal still did not explain what he needed them for.

For several days he requested the papers and for several days he refused to explain to Nick what he was looking for. One day he looked up from The Cardiff Times and asked if Nick was aware of any recent communication for them from the police.

“None,” Nick said, “I’d have told you.”

Hal sighed and rubbed his temples.

“Yes, of course you would. I apologize.”

Nick weighed whether this was an opportunity and, deciding it was, asked, “Is there something we should have heard about?”

Hal did not answer right away. When he did he gestured for Nick to come look at the paper.

The article Hal indicated was a small mention on the tenth page about a series of animal attacks in a forest north of the city one night a few weeks previously that were no longer being investigated due to the fact that they had not recurred. Nick read it several times, glancing occasionally at Hal to see if he would supply any hints as to the significance of the event. He did not, so Nick said nothing and read the article again, carefully, and then again, until he finally remembered something.

Their entire contract with the police was not, as such, a contract; certainly it was not legally binding in any way, although Nick consulted on exactly how the exchange between parties should be set up. Within that approximation of a contract, Hal had included a request that the vampires be informed of any suspicious animal attacks taking place in the area. He did not elaborate further, and the police they worked with did not seem confused by this condition, so it had only stuck in Nick’s mind because of how curiously vague it was and how he had not been informed about it beforehand.

Nick looked up from the newspaper. “You weren’t told,” he said.

“No,” Hal confirmed.

Nick almost asked another question, because he felt like, at best, he was operating with about 10% of the information he needed to make sense of the situation, but he disliked displaying too much ignorance after so much time with Hal; it had been well over a year, and even when he didn’t know things he liked to be able to pretend that he did or work them out for himself. So instead of asking, while Hal brooded and began to flip through another paper, Nick did his best to use the few pieces he had to guess at the whole picture.

It took some time, but realization hit him hard.

“Werewolves,” he said, not asking if he was right, because once he got there he was certain he must be.

“Yes,” Hal said.

Nick did not know what this could mean. He had been told briefly about werewolves, but he did not know much more than that they existed and that vampires looked down on them, which he had not counted as remarkable because, as far as he could tell, vampires looked down on everyone. But as the source of Hal’s anxiety, they became more intriguing to him. 

“So this is why you’re out of sorts? Werewolves?”

Hal shot Nick a look that suggested he wanted to object to being labeled ‘out of sorts,’ but he apparently managed to brush his offense aside.

“I am _concerned_ ,” he said, “because I was not informed of their presence.”

“Maybe they forgot to tell you,” Nick said, and then before Hal could interject he rebuked himself. “No, not likely eh, because they’ve worked with vampires for a long time, so they must have run into this before.”

“Yes indeed,” Hal said, and despite his ever-present tension he seemed pleased that Nick had provided the answer for himself.

“So what does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” Hal said, “but I am certain it cannot be anything good.”

*

Before they spoke to the police, Hal instructed Nick to let him do all of the talking. Nick found this somewhat insulting, and he told Hal as much. 

“Cutler,” Hal said sharply when he raised his objection, “you are very bright, but this is a situation you do not understand.”

“Neither do you.”

Hal inclined his head in concession. 

“You’re right,” he said, “but I believe I have more of an inkling than you. So let me handle this.”

“You could tell me what you think you know,” Nick continued to protest.

“I will tell you when I know that I know it,” Hal countered, and Nick admitted defeat. He had no real desire to take part in the conversation anyway; what he desired was Hal’s respect, and although this want remained, he knew he would not earn it by pestering him.

One reason Hal wished to handle the conversation himself, it became apparent when Nick listened in on it, was that he did not want to reveal that he had not known about the attacks. He called the police chief and, adopting a casual tone, said he was keeping a close eye on the situation, and that they need not worry about the increasing frequency of the incidents. The chief’s response shed some light on the purpose of Hal’s maneuvering; he did not seem to know that Hal had not been informed of the werewolf’s- or werewolves’- presence.

Hal did not seem surprised by this.

“Thank you for your time,” he said to the chief as he prepared to hang up. “Please keep in contact with my representative.”

“Will do,” the man said, “Fact, I saw him just this morning. Did he not tell you he was coming in?”

“It must have slipped his mind,” Hal said, and the fact that he said it through gritted teeth was noticeable only to Nick, who could see his grimace.

“He does seem to have a lot on his plate,” the chief said, “but I can see why you delegate so much to him. He’s a sharp one, Huntington.”

Hal’s face went hard.

“He certainly is,” he said, and Nick could tell he was straining to maintain his steady tone. “Thank you again. I will be in touch.”

Hal almost cut off the man’s goodbye with how quickly he hung up the phone.

“Huntington?” Nick said when Hal did not offer an explanation.

“William Huntington, I assume.” Hal did not meet Nick’s eyes. He looked like he was staring at something across the room, but Nick guessed he was just staring.

Nick waited for more details, but Hal was not forthcoming.

“And… who is that?” he eventually asked.

“A vampire,” Hal answered.

“Oh thank you, I am a complete idiot so I hadn’t figured that much out on my own.”

Hal finally looked up at him and, although Nick could see he was irritated, he did not snap.

“A vampire I know,” Hal elaborated, “someone from my past. Someone I wouldn’t have counted as significant, and who I honestly thought might be dead. It’s been over thirty years since I heard anything about him.”

Nick wanted to complain that Hal was still telling him almost nothing, just using more words to do it, but he did not want to make him angrier and stop him talking altogether.

“Why do you think he’s here?” he asked instead.

“I assume to oppose me.”

“I thought you said no one would oppose you.”

“I said no one here would oppose me,” Hal snapped, “and threats from the outside like this are rare. This isn’t just political maneuvering; he has a personal grudge against me.”

“Why?”

“The short answer is that I prevented him becoming an Old One.”

Nick wished Hal would stop forcing him to ask for the details.

“Why?” he said again, and Hal sighed.

“You’re asking for the long answer, but there’s too much history behind it. Let’s just say that I felt he had no sense of responsibility, was not mature enough to be granted this position. I managed to convince others of my point of view, and he was denied admittance.”

“Okay,” Nick said, “so he hates you. What’s that got to do with werewolves?”

“I told you,” Hal said, irritation even more pronounced in his voice, “Strong leadership is of the utmost importance. This is an attempt to undermine me.”

“What, by making you look like you’re out of touch?”

“Something like that,” Hal said, and Nick knew there was something very significant that he was not being told, but he also knew Hal had run out of patience for the day, so he did not ask any more questions.

*

Nick learned the significance of the werewolves the following evening when Fergus, wearing the smirk he defaulted to when speaking to Nick, answered his query about where the others were going with the alarming answer, “To the dogfight.”

Nick did not have to think long to figure out what that meant. When he stepped outside and looked up at the darkening sky he saw, just over the roof of the opposite house, a full moon.

He went to Hal immediately.

“Dog fights?” he exclaimed, his palms flat on Hal’s desk, where Hal was seated with what appeared to be a half written letter in front of him. He looked up from his work in his own time, despite Nick’s dramatic entrance.

“What about them?”

Nick stared as the fight went out of him and he dragged his hands across the desk until they slid over the edge and his arms went limp at his sides.

“You have dog fights.”

“I have had them in the past,” Hal said. “It seems I will likely do so again. You have some sort of objection?”

Nick stared harder. He was not certain if it was a win or a loss when he decided simply to ask Hal what his plan was.

“You have made the connection that this is Huntington, of course,” Hal said, which meant he was not certain that Nick had, which was insulting.

“Obviously,” Nick said, crossing his arms.

Hal paused.

“All right,” he said, “if you’re so on top of this, then why don’t you tell me my plan?”

Nick had really thought he was not able to hate Hal anymore. It had been months since he had been angry at him or appalled by him, and since Nathan he’d suspected that this change in attitude was a permanent one. But as he faced down Hal’s satisfied expression as he issued this challenge, as his brain supplied him with endless gruesome depictions of what a dogfight might entail, as well as the certainty that they existed purely for entertainment, a cruelty that did not even provide them with sustenance, he found hatred again, and with it, rage.

“You want to know what I think you should do?” 

Hal gestured for him to continue.

“I think you should go fuck yourself.”

Hal raised an eyebrow, and Nick stormed out of the room.

*

Nick was both surprised and relieved when Hal reached out to him the next day.

He had not gone to the study as he usually did when he returned from work, in part because he was still angry, but mostly because he was not sure if Hal wanted him to regardless of how he was feeling. He’d never walked out on Hal in anger before; he’d been angry at Hal, and he had walked out on him, but never both at the same time. Never so much as if he was responding to a serious disagreement with a friend.

He realized too late that he may well have upset their balance, and he had no idea how to right it.

This was troubling in particular because it reminded him that their balance was his entire life’s balance; the stability of his world depended on Hal. Hal was the center, and if Nick had caused some sort of permanent damage in his heated moment, he had no idea where he would build a new foundation.

So when Hal found him making tea in the kitchen and requested that he bring it to the study when he was done, he was, for the most part, grateful.

When he got upstairs and sat down across from Hal’s desk he was not sure what he was expecting to hear, but it certainly was not an apology. In shock he asked Hal to repeat it, then regretted that he did so, because he did not want to put pressure on this charitable mood.

Luckily Hal did not seem bothered.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I should have told you more and I should not have treated you as if you were being unreasonable. You weren’t. I have confided in you before, and I will do so again, but this turn of events surprised me, and I was not prepared to seek council.”

Nick thought he felt his anxiety physically seep out of him, and the remainder of his anger went with it. As they departed, he was able to think more clearly.

“It’s all right,” he said, “I shouldn’t have gotten angry. It’s just… dog fights…”

“You believe them to be a barbaric practice,” Hal supplied. Nick did not deny this.

“I don’t disagree with you,” Hal said, “that’s why I have not organized them myself for some time. I find them less entertaining than others do. They are essentially a spectator sport in which we only comprise the audience, and I do not enjoy being a bystander. I like to be challenged.”

Nick chuckled at this, and Hal smiled at him.

“Do you find this to be an inaccurate description of my character?” 

“No,” Nick said, “quite the opposite. You got yourself down pat.”

Hal smiled wider.

“So,” Nick said, still somewhat hesitant after the previous evening’s conclusion, “what are you going to do?”

“I have to take over the fights,” Hal said, “and I will have to continue them. Huntington is trying to win favor with my people, and this is a good way to do it. They love the fights. It’s the precursor to him making more serious challenges to my power. I cannot let this progress.”

“How are you going to take them over?”

“I will have to confront him.”

“What if he tells you to go to hell?”

“Then I will kill him.”

Nick must have visibly reacted to this statement, because Hal continued by saying, ““I do not relish the thought. But many power disputes only end when there is a last man standing. This is why I try to avoid becoming involved in them.”

Nick nodded. It was shocking to think of Hal killing another vampire, but Nick cared none for most of them anyway, a fact which only served to emphasize how significant it was that he had come to care for Hal.

He was close to Hal. If any part of him was still hesitant to admit it the day before, their fight and the fear he felt before it was resolved made him unable to avoid acknowledging it, even to himself. He had feelings about Hal that he had about no one else he had met since his making, and he realized, now that he was beyond anger, that what he’d felt when he’d learned of the fights was not actually any combination of emotions that he had felt toward Hal before. It had a distinct aspect, a feeling that one can only have about someone for whom they also feel a not insignificant level of admiration and respect: he had been disappointed.

To identify the admiration that gave rise to his ability to be disappointed was not to be able to explain it. He tried to track the course of it, to understand all that fed into it, but between the emotion and its source lay that vast murky terrain that he was either unable, or unwilling, or unwilling to admit that he was unwilling to penetrate. Whatever it began as, something that passed through that wilderness emerged within his consciousness as respect. There was no question of allowing it to be felt; it was felt already. To question its origins was to question the origins of what fed it, and what fed that, and so on until he was dizzy with trying to parse his feelings and decided that it might be best simply to feel them.

*

The confrontation with Huntington came the next day, and brought with it more unpleasant details of the dogfights. The dog had won, Nick heard first, making him aware that it had not been a fight between two werewolves but between a werewolf and someone or something else. It did not take much more listening in on the other vampires’ conversations to learn that the deceased party had been a human.

He did not feel the sharp jab of moral outrage that he had the day before when this was revealed to him; whatever had prompted it seemed to have passed back into the mists of his mind and was again out of his reach. His disappointment remained, but he lacked the fuel for anger.

Except, perhaps, directed toward Huntington. Although anger was probably not the correct word for that feeling; disdain was a more accurate term.

The man looked as if he’d been born for vampirism. He was tall, thin, and pale, with teeth that looked like they’d been sharp before they were fangs. He showed Hal no deference, which Nick supposed it was hypocritical of him to be bothered by, but he believed he’d earned the right. He felt certain Huntington had never earned anything in his life. It took only a few minutes of listening to him speak to gather that he was used to getting his way, which no doubt made Hal barring him from becoming an Old One all the more enraging to him.

Nick did not try to hide his dislike from his face as he watched Huntington reject Hal’s offer to take over the fights, and he extended it to the other vampires standing in the funeral parlor, most of whom watched with gazes that suggested they were invested in the conflict, but not in one particular outcome from it. Even Fergus had the look in his eye of a man who might jump ship.

Disloyal cowards, Nick thought, and ignored the part of him that asked why he cared.

If Hal wanted to take over, Huntington suggested, perhaps he should prove himself. Nick did not have to ponder what this meant. When Hal agreed to it with a grimace, Huntington said he would see him on the next full moon, and Nick’s stomach dropped.

“Don’t do it,” he said as soon as he was alone with Hal.

“What else would you have me do?” Hal asked.

“Not this!”

“I have to,” Hal said. “If I am perceived to react to him with cowardice in any way it will not matter if I kill him; he will have won. I will be seen as unfit to lead. So I must do this, and I must win, and only after that will I be able to kill him.”

Nick knew better than to argue further. He folded his arms and leaned against one of the study’s plush reading chairs, too jittery to take a proper seat, and he watched Hal arrange papers on his desk as if he were totally unbothered by the fact that he had agreed to a cage match with a werewolf.

“Did you know he would do that?” Nick asked softly after some time had passed.

“I suspected,” Hal said. “But once the fights started I could not preempt them. That would have been-” 

“Weak.”

“Yes.”

Nick looked down at the floor, absently tracing the seams of the hardwood with his foot. As his eyes drifted up and down the planks, he fell into a habit he’d developed as a child of trying to find patterns or whole scenes in places where they were not intended, such as the details of tiles or the back of a church pew. Now, in the walnut grain of the study, he could interpret only omens of doom.

“Do you think you can win?” he asked without looking up, and he heard more paper shuffling from Hal’s desk before he got an answer.

“Of course,” Hal said, and Nick did not think looking at his face would have helped him determine if he meant it.

*

Aside from Hal’s appointment with the werewolf looming ever nearer, the weeks passed in relative normality. If Hal killed a little more frequently, no one said anything about it, and if the other vampires treated him with just a degree less reverence than he was accustomed to, he did not say anything about it.

Nick made up for the lack of Hal’s anger and anxiety. He glared at the other vampires as often as they sneered at him, and more often than not he spent as much time pacing the study as he did reading or working in the evenings.

Huntington showed his face frequently during that month, often spending days at the funeral parlor or hunting with groups of vampires at night. Each time someone was pleasant to him, or spent time with him, or responded to Hal with any less respect than they used to, Nick hated them and Huntington more. He was appalled at how easily they were won over by some posh clown who hadn’t had enough respect from The Old Ones to outweigh one man’s bad opinion of him and earn a place among them.

Hal seemed unbothered by his disloyal followers. When Nick ranted about them he appeared to be amused but unconcerned, and eventually Nick asked him why.

“I am not naïve,” Hal answered. “What have I told you about leadership? A good leader understands the people he leads. I know they are only loyal to me as long as they believe I am the best and the strongest leader they can have.”

“It doesn’t bother you that they think you might not win?”

“No,” Hal said, “that’s just proof that they are idiots, which I also already knew.”

Nick smiled and felt, at least a little bit, reassured.

*

A few days before the full moon, Hal interrupted Nick’s pacing and stood up from the desk to hand him a letter.

“Apparently this has been trying to make its way to you for a while,” he said as he offered it. “Eventually it got into the hands of someone who was able to bring it to us.”

Nick took the envelope and tried not to react visibly when he saw the name on the return address.

Hal stood watching him for a moment, then returned to his desk. 

If it hadn’t been so unexpected, Nick would’ve recognized Nathan’s messy scrawl. He’d addressed the letter to Nick’s old house originally, and had almost certainly gone to great pains to determine where it should end up when it was returned to him. The postage stamp was dated over a month previously, but it was very likely that it had gone through quite unofficial channels to finally make its way to Cardiff, so it was possible that Hal was telling the truth about having just received it. The seal was, by all appearances, unbroken.

Nick stared at his own name on the envelope, Nathan’s letters slanting dramatically to the right and the dot over the “i” in Nick a large, dark blot of ink, as if the pen had been pressed a little too purposefully to the paper. He stared at his old address, pictured the small brick house with the small front garden and three white steps up to the thin white door that opened onto a modest beige parlor with tasteful if eclectic furniture that he and Rachel had accumulated over the years, that he had done nothing with before he left, that could be anywhere by now, that he would never see again. He stared at Nathan’s name in the top corner of the envelope and remembered the last time he saw him, the familiar lines of his face and deep warmth in his eyes as well as the unfamiliar; lines that had not been there before and an increase in the gray in his hair that he was accumulating early, like all the men in his family. Nick wondered how much grayer he had become in the last few months, how many more lines his life had earned him, how many other subtle changes Nick would notice on his face if he saw him now, and how his own face would be the same as it had always been, his hair never greying, wrinkles never forming, forever the portrait of a man of twenty-five no matter how long he lived. He stared at the envelope and he wondered what it might contain, what entreaties Nathan had decided to make despite Nick’s warning to leave him be, what inadequate help he had tried to offer. 

He glanced at Hal, who also would not change, who also would not gray or become lined, who also would endure long after the little brick house got torn down and the furniture it used to contain had gone to rot and then to dust. Hal who might well spend an eternity of evenings with Nick in a study like this, drinking tea or wine or brandy by a crackling fire, talking or not talking or reading or writing. Hal who had become his friend. Hal who had become his home. Hal whose companionship came without the caveat of mortality.

Nick looked back down at the envelope and gently ran his fingers over his own name. Then he moved the few paces to the fireplace and tossed the letter into it.

Hal glanced up at the crackle of the fire, and when he saw the burning paper that was its source, he looked at Nick, and smiled.

*

On the day of the full moon, Hal seemed as calm as anyone could be under any circumstances, let alone dire ones, while Nick was channeling more than enough anxiety for the both of them. He asked Hal several times if they needed to do anything to prepare, and Hal told him no several times, each time less politely than the time before. Nick hardly noticed. He found it intolerable to sit around waiting, and when Hal would not give him tasks he did his best to create them on his own to avoid going mad. But self-imposed they were fairly ineffective, and by late afternoon he was driving Hal mad along with him.

It was a strange relief to finally leave for the fight.

Hal wore one of his usual well-made suits, one choice among many that evening that Nick decided not to question. He had the jacket draped over the back of his desk chair before they left, and Nick picked it up and held it out for him to slide into, every action heavy with potential to be a last time.

“Thank you, Cutler,” Hal said. 

Nick was not sure how his voice would come out if he spoke, so he nodded.

Huntington had acquired a warehouse by the River Taff that he was using to host the fights. It had probably cost him next to nothing, having been abandoned for some time and being surrounded by other abandoned and similarly dilapidated buildings. To get there they moved first through wealthy, inhabited areas like the one in which they resided, but these slowly gave way to smaller, plainer houses, until they passed into a decrepit business district and eventually picked up the path along the river where the curbs collected piles of damp garbage and the concrete was littered with broken glass. Nick struggled not to find symbolism in their journey.

A large crowd had already gathered when they arrived. Nick caught the eyes of several of Hal’s original crew, including Fergus and a dull idiot named Dennis, and he glared at them. He walked with Hal to a makeshift platform created with shipping pallets and stood beside it while Hal ascended to speak to Huntington. 

Nick likely would not have heard what was said even if he had been paying attention, but he wasn’t. His gaze had caught on the large cage in the center of the room, and on the figure inside.

He should not have been surprised to see a man, but he was. The man was very average-looking, perhaps a little pale, with light hair and a sharp face. He did not look overly hairy or bulky or wild; he was just a man. The only thing that was particularly remarkable about him was how scared he seemed to be.

Nick could not take his eyes off the man. The other vampires were mostly milling about and talking amongst themselves, but a few had gathered to jeer at the captive, barking or calling to him like a pet. Nick stared for so long that eventually the man’s wandering gaze landed on him, and something of what Nick felt must have shown in his face, because the man’s expression held, for an instant, a light of hope. Nick instantly regretted the connection. He had nothing to offer this man, and to make him think so felt like an additional cruelty. Unwilling to drag it out, he shook his head ever so slightly, and the light faded from the man’s eyes, and he looked down at his folded knees. 

“Cutler,” Hal said sharply, and Nick turned. Hal was looking at him expectantly, and he realized he was supposed to take the clothes that Hal was removing for the fight. He stepped up onto the platform and pulled Hal’s suit jacket off as reverently as he had put it on, despite the lingering image of the trapped man’s despair burning on the back of his eyelids.

When Nick started his law degree, he’d been told over and over that he was idealistic. Some said it with a sneer; others said it with solemn compassion. The latter group told him this trait was admirable, but that he would have to learn to temper it; that he would face situations that could only have good outcomes through divine intervention, and that, at least in his line of work, there were no miracles. To do the work, they said, he would have to know this, to keep it always in his mind, and to use the knowledge to build up an armor that would allow his losses to roll off his back. Sometimes, they said, you just had to bear in mind the bigger picture.

Now, standing in the run-down warehouse with Hal’s coat, shirt, and tie in his hands, watching Hal descend from the platform to enter the grim arena, he recalled that advice. He could not save the man in the cage. Regardless of the outcome of that evening, Nick knew they would keep him as their captive, making him fight month after month until he lost. He could do nothing for him, and to try would likely kill them both, or worse. The man’s life was spent; he was, perhaps even more so than anyone else in the room, a dead man walking. 

But Hal had a chance.

Such was the hand they’d been dealt.

Nick closed his eyes for a moment and allowed himself very briefly to feel the pain of failure, then dismissed it and turned his attention to Hal.

The only windows in the warehouse were at least twenty feet up just below the roofline on the west-facing side of the building, so everyone within was able to track the sun’s descent against the eastern wall. When it began to dip too low to shine into the room, the crowd’s attention was drawn at once to the cage where the trapped man emitted a blood-curdling scream.

Instantly the other vampires began to shout and cheer, but they were quickly silenced by a loud word from Huntington.

“My friends,” he began when the room had gone quiet, “Thank you so much for your attendance. We have a very special treat for you tonight. Most of you are familiar with Neil.” He indicated the man who was now on his hands and knees, breathing heavily. “And you are all, of course, familiar with our other contestant tonight. Please extend your warmest of welcomes to the brilliant, the inimitable, the legendary, Lord Henry Yorke!”

Everyone cheered. Nick did not. He watched Hal stand in the corner of the cage opposite Neil, who was throwing his head back and screaming every few seconds. Hal was watching this transpire with an unreadable expression on his face.

“You know the rules,” Huntington continued. “The fight is to the death. The dog fights with his body. The opposing party gets a weapon- and oh, dear me, I have forgotten to provide Lord Hal with one. My deepest apologies.”

Huntington turned and reached into a large bag he had set behind him on the platform, and he pulled out a bat. Nick glared, and as Huntington turned back he caught his eye and smiled. 

Nick knew, having heard about the dog fights frequently for the last month, that the non-lupine party was supposed to be provided with a knife. Apparently Hal would not have even that much help.

A man Nick did not recognize ran up to Huntington and took the bat, opened the gate, and tossed it inside, slamming the cage shut again as soon as he could and triple-checking that it was locked. 

Hal moved slowly about the space, his eyes always on Neil. When he reached the bat he picked it up. He examined it for a moment, feeling the wood of the paddle and the metal of the handle. Nick watched him until both of their attention was drawn back to Neil, whose body had just emitted a queasy crack, and who was now screaming almost nonstop. Hal situated both of his hands on the handle of the bat, firmly planted his feet, and waited.

Nick felt panic rising in him as he wondered why Hal did not go ahead and kill the man now, before he could attack him, but as the thought crossed his mind he understood it to be foolish. Hal was in this situation because he refused to be made to look weak; he would not have come this far just to kill a defenseless person. His waiting, like everything else he’d done since Huntington arrived, was for the benefit of the crowd.

The waiting did not last too much longer.

Neil was changing before their eyes, and even though Nick had told himself he would not think about it, would focus on Hal and Hal alone, he could not look away from the transformation. Neil’s shirt was gone and his spine seemed to be expanding beneath his skin. His fingernails were extending and sharpening. His fingers were growing larger and closer together. His nose was widening and elongating at the same time, and his entire body was sprouting thick, dark hair. It seemed to take both an eternity and a fraction of a second for the change to be complete, and when it was every trace of Neil was gone, replaced by a massive black wolf that stood at least six feet tall on all four legs. 

The wolf snarled. Nick jerked his head back to the other side of the cage to look at Hal, who seemed just as calm as he had for the entire evening, and who was not moving, just watching the wolf with the bat held above his left shoulder, ready to swing.

A tense standoff held for several minutes, and then the wolf leapt at Hal.

But Hal was not there anymore.

He’d moved faster and more fluidly than Nick would have thought possible, and suddenly he was behind the wolf on its left, but when the wolf whipped its head around he was on the right, and then he was directly behind, and in front again, and always at least a step ahead of wherever the wolf was attacking.

He let this dance play out for a while without trying to do anything other than dodge; or perhaps more accurately, Nick thought, anticipate. Despite his fear, Nick was captivated by the display. He had seen Hal do a great many things in the time he’d known him, but he’d never known he was quite so quick and graceful.

The wolf found these qualities irritating. After a few moments of, essentially, running around in a circle trying to get at Hal, it changed tactics. It stopped for a moment, and Hal did too. It sniffed the air, and Hal stood behind it, just to its right, and watched it. It was a bizarre thing to see; the wolf’s movements were animal, but they seemed to be informed by a higher intelligence than it should have had. This became most apparent when it began to turn toward Hal and Nick realized that it meant to feign an attack and come back quickly the other way. He felt himself gasp involuntarily, but Hal had realized it too, and he outmaneuvered it and finally, finally attacked.

He could not move as quickly when he was actually trying to make contact with the wolf, and Nick held his breath as each blow came down. The wolf’s misses were even narrower, but it was still missing. Hal was not.

He made each swing of the bat count. He beat the wolf about the torso, eliciting yelps and moans in between growls. When he could, he got in a blow nearer the head. Eventually one of these hit hard enough to daze the wolf, and Hal did not waste an opportunity. He began to slam the bat over the wolf’s head repeatedly, lifting it above his own head each time to use as much of the power of gravity in the swing as possible. The wolf fought to get up, but with each blow it moved more slowly, until it was impossible to tell if it was still trying to stand or just twitching involuntarily. It opened and closed its enormous mouth, but there was no more threat in its sharp bright teeth. With one final, massive swing, Hal brought the bat down on the wolf’s head and left it there. It twitched once more and went still. Within seconds all that remained was a naked, dead man.

There was such silence in the warehouse that everyone could hear Hal’s heavy breathing. The hush held for several minutes, until it was broken by the sound of Hal picking up the bat and slamming the wooden half over his knee, splintering it into five pieces, an action which was followed by an eruption of cheering that Nick was surprised to find was led by him. He hadn’t been aware of priming his lungs and opening his mouth so he could shout louder than he’d remembered he was able, but he was doing it, and when the others took up a chant of “HAL! HAL! HAL!” he found himself joining in.

Huntington was the only one who did not look pleased. He smiled, but his contempt was obvious. He gestured for the man who had given Hal the bat to open the cage, and he beckoned Hal back to the platform.

“Well, ladies and gentleman,” he began as Hal walked over, “what a show! What a talent! What an experience we all got to be-“

He was cut off by a piece of the broken bat being driven into his heart.

He turned with wide eyes to face Hal, who was still holding his makeshift stake and wearing an expression in which Nick read, ever so subtly, triumph.

The room was silent again.

Huntington’s body began to gray, and Nick realized he was turning to ash.

In a few seconds all that remained of him was a pile of clothes.

Hal looked down at it for a moment, then raised his head to look out at the crowd.

There was a moment of tension, then another thunderous cheer. Hal quirked his lips in a small smile and raised the stake above his head, drinking in the applause, the admiration, the respect that he’d seemed to know all along he would earn back. He met Nick’s eyes briefly, and when he did his smile grew wider and was accompanied by a soft chuckle, and Nick could not help laughing with him.

*

When they made it back to the house and up the stairs Hal said, “Come to my room, please.”

Nick knew better than to take it for a request rather than a command, but he appreciated Hal’s polite tone nonetheless. 

He had never been in Hal’s room before, and it did not occur to him until he was crossing the threshold to feel strange about it. The evening had been strange enough already, and it hardly seemed like he could get shy about such a, relatively speaking, small moment in their relationship, but he could not swallow the awkwardness once he felt it.

The room was well-appointed, but less magnificent than Nick expected. He always found Hal’s study to be luxurious, and he had expected his bedroom to follow that trend. It was very comfortable, certainly, with a well-made quilt on the large bed and a beautiful red and gold rug on the floor and complimentary gold drapes hanging from the windows, before which stood two plush armchairs similar to those that occupied the study. Hal moved to one of these, slowly, and sat down.

He had taken his shirt back from Nick immediately following Huntington’s death and put it on before Nick had got a good look at him. Now he took it off again, wincing a bit as he did so, and Nick saw why.

There were a series of what looked like small burns on his torso, and several more on his hands and lower arms. Hal hung his shirt on the arm of the chair and asked Nick to bring a bowl of water and a towel from the bathroom next door. Nick obeyed quickly. He came back and knelt beside Hal and began to clean the wounds without being asked.

“Thank you,” Hal said, sucking in a breath occasionally as Nick passed the towel over a particularly raw spot. 

“How?” Nick asked.

“Werewolf blood,” Hal replied, and Nick looked up at his face.

“Werewolf blood?”

“It’s toxic to us,” Hal explained, “I tried to avoid it as much as possible but…”

Nick looked back down at the burns.

“Will they heal?”

“They should,” Hal said, “they were minor. I’ve seen much worse.”

Nick continued wiping away the remains of the toxic blood much more carefully.

“What happens if a vampire drinks it?” Nick asked.

“They die.”

Nick paused in his ministrations and stared Hal in the face for several seconds. Hal’s expression was unreadable. After a moment Nick continued cleaning the wounds in silence.

As he was finishing up Hal’s torso and preparing to leave the towel to him to clean his arms himself, Nick said, “How much else have you not told me?”

Hal waited for a moment to answer.

“It is not an intentional slight when I do not tell you something.”

Nick raised an eyebrow.

“It isn’t,” Hal insisted. “I forget how new this still is to you, how little you know. You have become quite a fixture here, and I rely on you, and I often assume you know things because I consider them to be common knowledge. Of course, for you, they are not.”

Nick was subdued. He was having another revelation that was really a series of them, the culmination of a journey he had not known he was on. It occurred to him for the first time that when in doubt he always assumed Hal thought the worst of him, but that this estimation came from his own mind, from his perception of Hal’s perception of him. Perhaps sometimes Hal really did leave him in the dark not on purpose, but because his impression of Nick’s competence caused him to forget how recently he’d entered this world. 

But Nick could not think about his perceptions without being aware of where they came from, and when he thought about where they came from he was back in a dark room in the bar in Liverpool falling to the ground before Rachel’s corpse. The image came in that moment suddenly and violently out of the mist where it hid and he cursed it for only emerging now to further confuse him, further complicate his already intensely complicated life and nearly unbearably complicated feelings for Hal.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

Hal did not respond, but kept his gaze on Nick’s face. He had finished wiping off his arms and placed the bowl and the towel on the small table next to the armchair. He had not put his shirt back on.

“What is there to misunderstand?”

“I don’t know. Nothing. Everything. Everything that’s happened since we met.”

Nick regretted it as soon as he said it. He didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want to dwell any more than he had in the last year and a half, did not want to resume those hours of circular thinking that got him nowhere, taking him around and around the space in his brain between the cloud and the chasm without ever actually finding a way to free himself from either, until he was right back where he started none the wiser for the journey. He was tired, suddenly; intensely, brutally tired. He did not want answers, would not be satisfied if he got them. He wanted now only what he understood Hal had been offering him all along; a life where the questions didn’t matter.

“Never mind,” he sighed. “You’re right. Or I don’t care. Whichever.”

Hal stood up from the chair and walked the few feet to where Nick stood. He came very close, leaving only the slightest gap between them. Nick felt very aware of the fact that Hal still wore no shirt.

“You were loyal to me,” Hal said. “The others were ready to follow whoever won, and I expect no less of them. But you were loyal.”

Nick said nothing, but held Hal’s gaze. Mere inches separated their faces. Hal’s next words were barely more than a whisper.

“I knew I chose right.”

Nick derailed the train of thought that declaration prompted before it could even begin its useless journey.

“I’m glad,” was all he said, and whatever else might be going through his mind, might live there in its deepest recesses throwing up images of pain and loss every time he felt like the ground where he stood was solid, he meant the words.

Hal smiled. It was his bright, genuine smile, the one Nick had not once in their time together seen directed at anyone else, and although he knew that time had been a miniscule fraction of Hal’s life, and that surely in all those centuries Nick had not been the only recipient of that affection, he felt just as certain that it meant a great deal that he was the only one who had it now.

Quite unexpectedly, Nick turned his attention away from the fog of memory and focused it on the chasm, and had another revelation. For months he had thought his only choices were to go through the mist or over the abyss, but now he saw another option in Hal’s smile.

He could jump.

He did not know what would happen to him when he hit bottom, but he knew that to remain was to continue pacing the same well-trod ground, and he had not realized how intolerable this had become until he knew he did not have to keep doing it. It was not enough simply to know where he stood; it was as good as being caged. He brought his subconscious self to the edge of the ravine and looked down into the darkness and felt no fear. 

The image was so vivid that he planted his feet firmly in real life, readying himself for a plunge. Hal raised an eyebrow at his subtle movement, and Nick stared into the eyes of the man who had dug this pit for him, and closed the gap between their mouths.

If Hal was surprised he adjusted quickly, and they stood connected for several moments, barely moving but not inactive, not overly enthusiastic but certainly not hesitant or reluctant. Nick took the initiative to end the moment as he had to begin it, and when he pulled away he was satisfied to see Hal’s mouth half-open in an expression that suggested he’d enjoyed it.

Nick smiled. Hal smiled back. In his mind Nick had left the mist behind and was soaring through the air, discovering there was joy in falling. 

*

In the late summer of 1953, Nick and Hal were sitting in a study that was not Hal’s, although it was not dissimilar. There was a corpse on the floor beside the couch, a scene that was by now so familiar to Nick that he mostly managed to inhabit it without thinking too long about the first time.

Nick had chosen the man, which was still a fairly irregular occurrence. Hal acted like it was a special treat. He sat next to Nick at a bar they frequented, although not too frequently- they operated outside of the law, but it would not do to become overly suspicious. Hal grinned and gestured in a vague manner to the crowd in the room. Who they killed made little difference to Nick, but he appreciated that Hal thought it mattered, so he picked out a young, well-dressed man without a wedding ring who was sitting alone, and he began talking to him. Hal joined, and when they felt the conversation winding down, Hal offered to drive the man home. 

He accepted, apparently either lacking the good sense to be suspicious of two total strangers’ intense interest in him, or too drunk to access it. Nick complimented his home when they pulled up outside, and this was apparently all the prompting he needed to invite them in for another drink.

A few hours later the man was dead and Nick and Hal were shirtless and bloody and fairly drunk, and Nick watched with interest from the couch as Hal sat down at the ornate piano that rested against the west wall.

“I didn’t know you played,” he said as Hal sounded a few tentative chords.

“I learned when it was first invented.”

Nick wished he could hear Hal make these statements about his age without reacting with awe, but he had not managed it yet. A few months previously, on the occasion of the coronation of the new queen, he had asked Hal how many British monarchs he had lived under, and received the unsatisfactory response, “quite a few.”

“That’s nothing, what you’ve said to me,” Nick complained.

“I haven’t been keeping count,” Hal replied, “it matters very little. I imagine around thirty or so.”

Nick could not think of much else to say to that, except to remark that it was no wonder Hal acted like the coronation was old hat, which made Hal smile.

And now he was casually mentioning that he had been born before the invention of the piano, something Nick probably would have assumed if he had given it any thought, but he was still unused to thinking about time in such broad strokes. He was only 28, and it was still quite difficult to picture the world changing around him as it had for Hal, constantly, over and over, for hundreds of years. It was a dizzying thought, which was why Nick never dwelled on it. He did not see much point in forcing himself to imagine it. He would know what it was like eventually; no need to pollute the present with too many potential futures.

Hal began to play a somber melody, and Nick scoffed audibly. Hal stopped.

“Would you like to make a request?”

“Yes,” Nick said, rising from the couch and moving to the most wide-open space in the room. “Liven this place up.”

“There is nothing here that is alive,” Hal pointed out.

“Work hard then,” Nick said, and raised his arms to grasp an invisible partner.

“Explain yourself,” Hal said. Nick shook his head.

“Just play,” he instructed, always glad to get to pretend at having authority over Hal. “You must know something good, you’ve been practicing for three hundred years.”

“More like two hundred and fifty,” Hal corrected, but he turned back to the keys and began a much brighter, faster tune with a rhythm that Nick picked up very quickly.

He and Rachel had taken dancing classes before they got married. They’d each had some lessons in school, but they wanted to have something special to show off at the big event. They’d learned several styles, their favorite being one that was still very new to England at the time, having been imported during the war from American soldiers. It was fast and energetic and incredibly fun, and Nick and Rachel had immediately decided it was what they would use for their wedding. They’d practiced a great deal, and the steps came back to Nick easily, and he brushed off the memories that accompanied them without much lingering emotion, a skill he was perfecting all the time. 

Although he was somewhat restricted on space, he moved gracefully about the room with his nonexistent partner. He got so lost in the performance that it took him a moment to notice that Hal had stopped playing and was staring at him.

“What?” Nick asked.

Hal responded by standing and moving to the record player that stood between the two windows at the front of the room. He looked briefly through the small stack of albums that sat on the table beside it before selecting one and putting it on. Another upbeat, fast-paced song came through the speaker. He turned back to Nick.

“Teach me,” he said.

Nick obliged.

He was not a very good dance teacher, it turned out, remembering perfectly well how to do the steps himself but nearly incapable of explaining them to another person, especially as drunk as both parties were. But through a combination of poor instruction and skillful execution, Hal began to get it down. He took over leading and Nick moved his left hand to Hal’s shoulder, and they whirled about the room until the music ended rather suddenly and they collapsed on the couch, laughing at how abruptly they stopped the dance in the silence they had not been prepared for. Nick made a half-hearted comment about how they needed to move the body from the floor and Hal, bearing down on him with other intentions evident in his gaze, said, “Later.”

*

Once Nick had found the ability to react to the prospect of eternal life with something other than a nauseating combination of fear and horror, he began to worry that it would get boring. He tried to think of anything he believed he could do for hundreds of years without going mad, and he always came up empty. To keep finding ways to fill a life indefinitely seemed a tall order.

He was already trying to stave off the lull he feared would come by keeping up keenly with the ways the world was beginning to change outside his small slice of it. In the last year he had gotten very interested in film, and had many times endured Hal’s scoffing at the entire concept by throwing out one of his endless supply of jokes about Hal being an old man. These jabs never ceased to irritate Hal, which meant they never ceased to delight Nick. But sometimes, instead of just amusing him, they instilled in him some existential fear that he was looking at his own future.

Was it inevitable that he would become so detached, he wondered? Would he have no choice but to grow apart from the rest of existence so much that he was bored by it all? Would his attempts to fill his life with things other than the trappings of vampirism eventually be for naught?

He raised this concern to Hal one night in bed by way of a casual question about whether he should take up some new hobbies, watching for a reaction on Hal’s moonlit face and rolling his eyes when he got a condescending chuckle.

“Do you think I let myself get bored?” Hal asked, and Nick said no, of course not, and Hal said well then, and it took Nick a moment to understand, but when he did he felt something jump in his chest.

He had of course assumed since very early in their relationship that, barring some unavoidable, unfortunate circumstances, he would be with Hal in some capacity for the rest of his life. He had not let himself consider whether Hal intended this to be the case; he could not control Hal, but by the end of their second year together he could not bear the thought of trying to remake his life without him, so it served no purpose to spend any energy worrying about that particular what-if.

But to hear Hal all but say he expected them to remain together, that if he would not get bored then how would Nick get bored, because there they’d both be, always, no matter how many hundreds of years that meant- well. It was a reassurance he hadn’t been looking for, but one he was thrilled to have gotten.

He raised himself up on his elbow and leaned over Hal. Hal raised an eyebrow at him, and Nick raised both of his back. Hal heaved a put-upon sigh, but extended an arm to bring Nick down to him, and as he leaned forward Nick thought perhaps there were a few things he wouldn’t mind doing for the rest of his very long life. 

*

The dog fights had continued because the others wanted them too, and it was not a particularly hard practice for Hal to keep up. The werewolf usually won and could therefore be counted on for the next match, so the most complicated part of planning each fight was obtaining a human competitor, and that was not particularly complicated for a group of people who survived by abducting people regularly. Nick was grateful that Hal made him play no part in the fights except attending them, which Hal claimed he did as some sort of show for his underlings, and which Nick did because Hal did.

Nick still found them to be the most distasteful part of vampire life, but he learned to tolerate the spectacle once a month for his own sake as much as anything. They bothered him in only the vaguest sense, as if the feeling were one that came to him from beyond the fog in his mind, a journey that was now so lengthy that the feeling was severely diminished and easily dismissed by the time it arrived in his consciousness.

Nick found it pleasing to have a constant rhythm to life, and he had developed a steady one in Cardiff. He went to work and then he did whatever needed doing for Hal and then he relaxed with Hal or read with Hal or hunted with Hal. He spent many nights with Hal over the years, but when he wasn’t in those moments he avoided thinking about them very hard, or at all. When it happened it was happening, and when it wasn’t it wasn’t, and it seemed he and Hal were both content with the arrangement, and Nick had long since stopped seeking meaning in anything that did not demand it. 

He almost never spent time with the other vampires after his first two years with them. He and Hal killed together, separate from the rest, so Nick only saw them at the dogfights or when Hal called group meetings of all the local vampires, which was not a terribly common occurrence. Since Huntington’s challenge, little had happened that was out of the ordinary, and for the most part everyone managed their day to day lives with little input from Hal, although Nick did once joke that he was surprised Hal ever let Dennis go unsupervised.

By spring of 1955 Nick sometimes, not even that rarely, thought he might be happy.

It was not until late in the year that he began to sense that the foundation of his new life was crumbling.

They’d had to get a new werewolf that spring after what the other vampires termed a “disappointing ending” to a fight that left both human and werewolf dead. The new man was called Leo, and he had quickly become a favorite. Nick was not sure he understood why; Leo was perhaps more reluctant than any werewolf he’d seen so far to participate in the fights, even seeming to show great restraint after he’d changed. Nick was surprised when he lasted past the first fight, as he gave the human in the cage several excellent opportunities to end it in his own favor. But the other man had been scared and disoriented and had not seized his chances, and when he was finally torn apart the vampires found it particularly satisfying. Perhaps the hesitation was the appeal, Nick thought after the Leo’s third fight. It seemed to heighten the stakes for them somehow.

Shortly after that third fight, Hal seemed troubled. He was mostly silent when they sat together in the evenings, and he was short with Nick when they did speak. Nick tried to ask what was wrong, but he was met with refusal to even acknowledge his question, and he had learned better than to ask twice.

Hal’s moodiness lasted for a few days before it turned around, and once he felt certain that it had truly passed, Nick became unconcerned about the fact that he had not found its source. He convinced himself that he had not been the cause, because Hal never hesitated to tell him if he felt he was doing something wrong, and as long as he did not need to correct any of his behavior he was sure the annoyance was temporary.

It came back after the next full moon.

Hal was angry and unpleasant to be around for longer this time, and he started to dismiss Nick from his presence several times a week. During the second week, emboldened by his hurt and rejection, Nick watched Hal leave the house and followed at a safe distance. He stood across the street as Hal entered the funeral parlor, and he did not need to go inside to develop a good theory about what Hal was doing there.

Nick did not ask why Hal was visiting Leo. The rage he knew he would encounter in response to the question was too overwhelming to even think about, and he would get no answer for his trouble. 

There were a few occasions in those weeks where Nick felt the prickling of old fear when Hal yelled at him or slammed things down on his desk. Nick did not question him, just tried to be as helpful and unobtrusive as possible while he waited and hoped for the cloud to lift. 

Eventually it did, for about a week, during which time Hal did not dismiss Nick once. Then the full moon hit again and the next day Hal raged at Nick over a drop of tea that made it onto his desk when Nick brought him his cup. Nick said nothing, even after the tirade ended, and when Hal calmed down his face changed, and Nick could not identify his expression. It was one he felt sure he’d never seen in five years. He wouldn’t have dared say it out loud, but he almost thought Hal was sad.

*

Nick knew, vaguely, where Leo was kept between fights. It was one of the many things he did a very good job of pretending he did not know, but after he was so mercilessly berated for the spilt tea he forced himself to be aware of it, because he wanted to speak to him.

If it hadn’t been so appalling, Nick would’ve almost laughed at how much the chamber where Leo resided resembled a medieval castle dungeon. He was certain it was appointed by the vampires for this purpose, something he had to be certain of because he did not want to entertain any other possible reason why there was essentially a prison cell beneath the funeral parlor.

“Hello Leo,” he said, ignoring the absurdity of him trying to have a casual conversation with a man in captivity who viewed him as one of his captors.

You are one of his captors, said a voice in his head that must have been his own, and the pang of guilt and shame it brought with it was of a degree he rarely felt these days, and he found himself struggling to push it aside.

“Who are you?” Leo asked sharply.

“Cutler. Nick Cutler.”

“Why are you here?”

“I just want to talk to you,” Nick tried to assure Leo, who did not seem to find this comforting.

“Then talk.”

“Okay,” Nick said, “see, I was just wondering…”

He trailed off, aware suddenly that he did not know what he expected Leo to tell him, that he did not know why he thought Leo would help him even if he could. He stared at the man who he now saw for certain spent more than just one night a month in a cage and he felt something threatening to emerge from the recesses of his mind, something strong enough to pass through the fog and survive the plunge into the ravine, and he knew he could not allow it to reach him, no matter how badly he wanted answers. He turned abruptly and left without saying another word. As he ascended the steps up from the basement two at a time he felt the alarming emotion that had been fighting its way to him begin to retreat, and he breathed a sigh of relief.

*

Over the next month Hal grew calmer, but he also grew more distant. He still spent much of his time with Nick, but they spoke less and less, and every day Nick felt the gap between them widening. By the week of the October full moon they barely spoke, and Hal almost always left his study in the evening and went immediately to his room without a word to Nick, and without an invitation.

Nick tried to no avail to make Hal talk. He was not as angry, now, but he was inaccessible, far from Nick in a way that made him acutely aware of how close they had become and how much he relied on their connection. 

The day before the full moon Hal was very distracted, and Nick had a growing sense that this was either some sort of new normal or the precursor to something even worse, and he was unwilling to let it stand.

“Tell me what’s going on,” he insisted to Hal that evening, “tell me, please.”

Hal looked at him almost blankly, and Nick wondered for a moment if he had even heard and understood the words. Eventually Hal said, “Nothing.”

“Bullshit.”

“Cutler,” Hal said, more firmly. 

Nick gave him a chance to continue.

Hal sighed. “Nothing I can discuss,” he said, “I’m sorry. I would tell you if I could.”

“Why are you avoiding me?”

“I’m not,” Hal said, “I just have a lot on my mind.”

“You are,” Nick said, “we barely talk, we never…”

He trailed off. He was brushing up against something they did not speak about, something they had never acknowledged with words, something they sustained by keeping it under wraps, and it did not matter how badly he wanted things to be right between them, he knew he risked breaking them irreparably if he pushed the wrong button. He couldn’t make Hal talk about what was wrong without acknowledging that maybe what existed between them had never been right, and even admitting that much to himself was too upsetting to be dealt with.

“I feel like you’re gone,” Nick said softly. “You’re here but you’re gone.”

Hal said nothing.

“I want to help, I know you said you can’t tell me but. Christ Hal, I want to help. Please let me help.”

He was embarrassed to feel the prickle of tears in his eyes and determined not to examine what had prompted them. He tried to swallow the lump in his throat before he spoke again.

“Don’t leave me alone in this.”

It was barely a whisper, but Nick knew Hal heard. His eyes moved from the documents he likely hadn’t really been reading to Nick’s face, and his expression had not changed but Nick saw something new in it, something he could not identify and did not want to, something he wished so badly would go away and be replaced with the familiar, any familiar, anything that would indicate that the way things had been could be again.

“I haven’t gone anywhere,” Hal said, and it barely sounded as if he believed it himself.

Nick could think of nothing else to say. He’d got to the heart of the matter and found nothing there to help him. Hal resumed his meaningless browsing of his papers, and Nick watched him for several more minutes, and felt suddenly quite numb.

“I think I’m gonna turn in early,” he said as he moved to the door.

“Good night,” Hal said without looking up.


	2. the other part

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "A door had been opened and could not be shut and then it was shut." - Landscape of Black Coats in Snow, Richard Siken

On October 31 of 1955, Hal was gone.

He was usually awake earlier than anyone else, so Nick was nervous when he rose and did not find him in his study. His anxiety grew when he checked his bedroom and found it open and empty. 

The bed was made. Nothing looked out of place. Nick walked briskly to the front window and saw that Hal’s car was not parked outside. He told himself it could be that Hal had left early on some errand without telling him, but that did not stop a panic rising in his chest as he hurried out of the house to not find Hal at the funeral parlor, to not find Hal at the police station, to not find Hal at any of the businesses he frequented. After several hours of increasingly frantic trips from one unlikely place to the next, Nick headed back to the house, trying to calm his mind by telling himself that perhaps Hal had returned while he’d been gone.

He did not give up this hope until he had searched every room of the house again, despite the fact that the car was still absent. After making a fourth trip from top to bottom of the three-story home, Nick collapsed on a chair in the study and tried to conceive of some logical explanation for Hal’s absence that he had not already considered, but he came up empty. As he sat and let his breathing even out from the hours he had spent quite literally running around Cardiff, a new thought occurred to him that brought with it the sensation of a stone being dropped in his chest and plummeting down to rest heavily on his stomach. He tried for a moment more to catch his breath, but it was a wasted effort; his shallow attempts to pull in air were no longer the result of overexertion but of a psychological burden weighing him down, and he would not recover until he went back to the funeral parlor to check, to prove himself wrong or to know for sure.

He stood before the door to the cellar where the werewolves were kept and had to inhale deeply before he could put his hand on the knob. He turned it slowly and looked down the staircase to the point where, with the lights off, the steps disappeared into what might have been nothingness. He exhaled, pulled the string that would illuminate the stairwell, and started slowly down.

The walk down the stairs and through the hall to the cell was intolerably long at the same time as it was not nearly long enough. He needed to know just as much as he could not handle knowing, and there was a screaming conflict in his head the like of which he had not experienced in a very long time. As he approached the cell he closed his eyes to prolong his ignorance, but the mental noise was unbearable and he knew there was only one way to make it stop.

Nick opened his eyes to an empty cell.

*

If no one else had yet figured out that something was wrong, they would no later than when the fight did not happen that evening, and Nick felt no desire to inform them any sooner. He wished he’d never have to talk to them about it. Every reaction he envisioned any of them having to Hal’s disappearance was inadequate. They would not share his pain, and if they sensed it they would mock him for it. 

He stood in the barren cellar for a long time, considering how he might proceed. It was not hard for him to come up with several sequences of events that would explain how both Hal and Leo came to be missing, but none of them seemed remotely likely. The story he could most easily believe was that Leo had gotten free of his bonds and killed Hal, then stolen his car to escape. But the chains that had been holding him were still sitting on the ground quite unbroken and clearly unlocked, and Nick could not imagine why anyone would have come down with a key on a night that Leo was not meant to fight unless their intention had been to release him.

He considered that Hal might have freed Leo for some other purpose and been overpowered once he had done so, but this also sounded like nonsense. Hal would never have put himself in such a vulnerable position, and he would not have been easily defeated. If there had been a struggle Nick thought there would be some sign of it, and there was none. By all appearances, Leo was purposefully released and then left willingly with whoever it was who had done it. 

Left willingly with Hal, he corrected himself, because no matter how much he did not want to admit it, nothing else made any sense. 

But Hal leaving in the middle of the night with a werewolf did not make any sense either. 

After several minutes of trying to piece together what Hal’s motivation might have been, or how he might have been coerced into doing this, or if he’d ever said anything in all their lengthy conversations that might explain his actions, Nick had come up with nothing but a headache. 

When he could no longer stare at the empty room, he left, and he was glad he had developed a reputation that prevented anyone from speaking to him as he exited the funeral parlor.

*

Trying to find Hal felt like the obvious next step, but it was a daunting task, and Nick did not have to think about it for long before he swallowed the fact that he would have the best information he could if he consulted with the other vampires. They had most likely seen less of Hal in the last weeks than Nick had, but many of them had known him for much longer, and although Nick did not believe any of them were ever nearly as close to him as he was, their memories might provide some insight into where to search.

He still did not bring the matter up to anyone, however, because he could barely admit it to himself. He had perhaps just once that day had the coherent thought that Hal was gone. The rest of the time he thought only in terms of correcting the situation, which kept the situation that needed correcting from being his primary focus. He could not imagine saying the words out loud to someone else, so he did not. When the late afternoon came and he knew the vampires would soon be gathering for the dogfight, he went to the funeral parlor.

Most of the vampires would meet at the warehouse, but Nick guessed correctly that several of Hal’s oldest followers were the ones who handled transporting the competitors to and from the fights, and when he found them they were standing in the cellar staring at an empty cage, and he hated that in that moment he felt even the smallest amount of kinship with them.

They all looked up at once when he entered.

Nick should have been prepared for wrath. He should have remembered that they hated him as much as he hated them, and that they would jump at any excuse to lay into him, and that they now had a massive one. He should have been ready, but he was anxious and distracted, so he wasn’t.

It was Fergus who advanced on him and pinned him to a wall, lifting him by his shirt so his feet hung off the ground.

“What the fuck is going on?” he snarled, and Nick had to motion to his throat rather wildly several times before Fergus understood that he was preventing his own question being answered. He eased up and let Nick’s feet touch the ground again, but he did not let go.

“I don’t know,” Nick said, and got a chorus of scoffing in response.

“Like hell you don’t know,” Fergus said, “How stupid do you think I am?”

It was hard for Nick to say what part or parts of the situation instilled in him such a disregard for self-preservation as to permit his next words out of his mouth.

“I think you’re spectacularly stupid,” he replied, and he was prepared to follow it with a remark about how he needed Fergus’ input despite this shortcoming, but Fergus punched him in the face.

Nick kept from falling to the ground by throwing himself back against the wall, which he thought too late might not be a better choice. His head slammed hard against the stone, and after a few seconds of ringing in his ears that drowned out all sound, he heard the others laughing.

He was feeling the already-forming bruise on his face when Fergus overcame his amusement and said, “Where is my dog?” 

Nick raised an eyebrow. “Your dog?”

“The dog. Lord Hal’s dog. You concussed?”

Nick was surprised how tempted he was to continue goading Fergus, but he reminded himself of the bigger picture.

“I assume he’s with Lord Hal,” Nick said.

“You think you’re funny?” Fergus said, and very quickly their antagonism went from entertaining to tedious.

“Believe it or not I think we’re on the same side right now,” Nick said, “so if you’ve got a conversational style other than hostile, maybe start using it.”

Fergus glared at him, but he said nothing more.

“Right,” Nick said, trying to ignore the multiple aches in his head. “You got to have figured as much as I have. Hal went somewhere with Leo.”

The other vampires found this uproariously funny, and it was several moments before Nick could engage with them again.

“I’m serious,” he said, and Fergus moved toward him again, and Nick put all his energy toward not flinching.

“You think we don’t know you did this?” He asked the question inches away from Nick’s face.

Nick wondered if he was actually concussed, if vampires got concussions, because the only response he could manage to the accusation was, “What?”

“You’re the one’s all squeamish about the fights. About everything, come to think of it. You’re the only one who woulda freed a dog. I’m not too fucking stupid to figure that much out.”

Nick sighed. Of course they suspected him. He had not been as prepared for the conversation as he thought.

“It wasn’t me,” he said, “why would I do it now, after all this time? Why would I stick around if I did? Do you think I came back here to rub it in your faces?”

There were glances of varying degrees of disbelief exchanged among the vampires.

“What happened then?” someone asked finally, and Fergus turned his glare on the man who had spoken.

“I don’t know,” Nick repeated, “I came here to see if you could help me figure it out.”

They all stared at him. Cameron, the man who had asked the question, looked from him to Fergus several times before he decided to speak again.

“What do you think we would know?”

“About Hal,” Nick said, “about where he might have gone.”

They stared for longer then, and Nick was growing wearier of the exchange by the second.

“You’re saying Lord Hal did this?” Dennis spoke up.

“He must have,” Nick said, “or did you not notice he’s gone too?”

The vampires exchanged glances again, and Nick realized that perhaps they had not noticed, that perhaps it was not unusual for them to go a day or several without even seeing the man.

“He left last night, near as I can figure,” Nick continued. “Leo was gone when I checked this morning.”

“Leo?” Cameron inquired. Nick rolled his eyes.

“The dog.”

“That’s nonsense,” Fergus said, “What would he do that for?”

“I keep saying that I know as little as you do. I don’t know why, I don’t know where they went, I’m trying to figure it out, and I was hoping at least one of you might be able to give me something useful to go on, but I obviously overestimated you.”

Nick turned to walk away and was stopped by Fergus after three steps.

“You swear you’re tellin’ the truth?” he said. “’Cause if I find out this is some story…”

“It’s not,” Nick said, “I just want to find him.”

Even this statement made him feel too vulnerable, and he turned to leave again, taking the overwhelming silence that he left behind as a sign that the others did finally believe him. 

*

Nick left it to the remainder of Hal’s top men to break the news to the vampires who were still waiting for the dogfight. He had no desire to bear witness to the uproar that would ensue, and he had plans to make.

His impulse told him to leave right away before Hal could go too far, or before Leo could kill him, which he had to consider a likely outcome of the situation. But he had no information about where to start looking, and he was a practical enough person even under stress to realize he should try to get some first.

He did not expect to find much, but if he was to find anything he knew Hal’s desk was the best place to look.

One of the first jokes Nick had made to Hal when he started to feel comfortable doing so was a quip about how he had no idea vampirism required so much paperwork. Hal had an extensive filing system full of a staggering number of documents, most of which Nick lacked context for. The quantity of documentation did make sense to an extent; as Hal’s lawyer, Nick had learned that much of his money came from quite a few significant investments, some of which he had made a very long time ago and been keeping careful track of since. But there were definitely things he did not tell Nick, and that Nick knew he could not ask, and that he still felt guilty and scandalized about invading even under extenuating circumstances. 

What he discovered, and what he really should have expected, he realized later, was primarily years of correspondence with many people Nick had never heard of. He’d received five letters in the last week alone, some more formal than others, but all clearly from people he knew well. Nick was only halfway through the first when he left behind his guilt about invading Hal’s privacy and began to hungrily consume as much as he could of Hal’s recent exchanges with a Wyndham, a Lady Mary, an Oliver, a Gertrude, an Ilia. Some references to the pasts that Hal shared with these people indicated that he had known them for decades, even centuries. Wyndham was another Old One, it seemed, and a recollection of an evening spent together in 1843 meant that Lady Mary must be a vampire, although some of what she said seemed out of step with typical vampire lifestyles.

Then again, what did he know about typical vampires?

Apparently even less than he had thought.

Nick recognized very quickly that the overwhelming emotions he’d experienced when he started reading the letters were anger and sadness. What it took him some time to figure out, and what he realized as he started on the fifth letter one Ilia Milavetz had sent to Hal in the last month alone, was that he was feeling betrayed.

Hal had never mentioned any of these people to him, not even in the many stories he told about his extensive life before Nick. In five years he had not spoken of any of them by name. Sometimes, as Nick dove deeper and deeper into the past, he found references to events that he had heard about, political happenings he thought Hal had confided in him about, but that apparently he had actually known next to nothing of. Some of the letters from Hal to his many confidants had to have been written while Nick was in the room with him, sometimes discussing the very thing he was writing a letter about, apparently having details withheld from him even as Hal spelled them out for someone else. 

He thought he’d been realistic with himself about his place in Hal’s world. He knew he wasn’t the only person Hal had ever confided in. He knew the scope of Hal’s life was immense. He knew there would always be things Hal kept from him. But somehow he had not been prepared for the reality that Hal had other meaningful connections at the same time as theirs, and that there might be some among his associates who had earned more of his trust.

He read several more weeks of personal correspondence before he had to admit to himself that he was learning nothing useful, only prolonging his torment. None of the return addresses on the letters were residences, and none of Hal’s acquaintances provided enough insight into their lives for Nick to make a good guess about where to find them. Secrecy is a plague among vampires, he thought bitterly. 

When he put these files aside and began to look again through Hal’s other papers, he stumbled upon a real estate folder, and once he’d found it he was immensely angry with himself for not thinking to look for it right away.

Hal had occasionally mentioned other properties he owned, and on the few occasions they’d done any traveling together they usually stayed at one of these. Nick learned from the real estate file that he owned several properties in Britain and Ireland, as well as a few in various other European countries, although it seemed a number of them had been destroyed in the war. But several large holdings remained. There was a home on a canal in Amsterdam. There were apartments in Florence and Barcelona. And there was a villa in the Pyrenees.

It made the most sense to check Hal’s residences in the U.K. first, Nick told himself, because if he was hiding he was unlikely to be at any property that his name was attached to regardless of where it was, and if he wasn’t hiding there was no reason to think he would have traveled far. Other possibilities tried to force Nick to consider them, but he would not. The homes Hal owned were the best lead he had, and as long as any remained to be investigated he would have a goal and a purpose, and he wanted these desperately. He gathered the information he needed and planned to head to London the next day.

*

Nick spent a week at the London house. He told no one where he was going because he did not care if they knew, and they almost certainly did not care that he was gone. He’d taken an extended leave of absence from his job, something no one he worked with was happy about, but he was not particularly concerned with whether he ever resumed working there anyway. He was pursuing higher priorities.

He had intended just to check for Hal at each home and move on if he was not there, but when he got to London he felt compelled to stay for a while. It would not do to miss Hal by a day or so because he did not wait long enough at a certain location. He managed to survive this idleness for a week before he could take the inactivity no longer and had to tell himself that Hal would not come here, and he needed to look elsewhere.

He spent four days in Manchester, then four in Edinburgh. He managed three each in Belfast and Dublin. He lingered for a full eight days in Amsterdam based on the fact that it was a likely entry point to the continent for Hal, assuming he was not already there. He also lingered because he found he liked the Dutch house, and the books he found there that were apparently yet another part of Hal’s extensive private collection, and walking along the canals when he needed physical activity to fill his day. He remained for these reasons, he told himself, and not because the list of places he could still hope to find Hal was growing ever shorter.

He went to Florence and Barcelona before he tried the mountain villa because these were easier to access if Hal needed a quick hiding place, and if he had gone to the home in the mountains because he needed somewhere more remote to stay for longer, then there was no reason to think he would not be there when Nick arrived.

The French home was just over an hour’s drive from Perpignan, but difficult to access despite this proximity. The tail end of the journey required leaving vehicles behind and making a short but steep hike to the crest where the house was situated. It was December by the time Nick made it to this final destination, and while it was not as chilly as he had expected, the altitude and the overcast day on which he arrived did nothing to make the climb more pleasant.

When he hauled himself over one last ridge and looked up he immediately understood why Hal would’ve made such an effort.

The house was smaller than Nick had expected, which he considered a positive. It was either very old or made to look very old, and given what he knew about how long Hal had owned it he assumed it was the former. It was in excellent condition despite this. The tile roof had clearly been re-laid no longer ago than five years, and the stone that comprised the walls was in excellent condition. The house was perched on the side of the mountain in a way that meant it did not have much of a yard, but there was a small garden space on the side that Nick faced.

That the house was beautiful and inviting was his first observation. His second was that it appeared to be empty.

*

There was a small terrace on the side of the house that had the better view, which was where Nick settled down after his sixth sweep of the property.

He had known the moment he saw the darkened windows in the fading daylight. He’d known from the obvious lack of recent foot traffic on the path to the front entrance. He’d known from the draft of stale air that greeted him when he opened the door. He’d known from the booming echo of his footsteps on the tile of the foyer. He’d known from the empty cupboards in the kitchen, from the layer of dust on the stair rail, from the linen-less beds in every upstairs room. He walked up and down the stairs six times, he opened and closed every bedroom door six times, he made a round from the kitchen to the living to the dining room and back six times, but all the while he knew. 

Nick was growing tired of believing himself to be pragmatic only to realize after he’d followed his impulses that he’d been chasing ghosts. 

He was not going to find Hal. As soon as he had the thought it was like he’d known it all along. He had tried to stay aware that he might well reach the end of his journey without finding anything, but the difference between knowing it to be a possibility and facing it as a reality was immense. 

Hal’s properties were the only solid lead he had, and he was quite unlikely to get another. Before he left the UK, he’d kept an eye out for news of animal attacks anywhere near Cardiff that night after Leo escaped, but nothing had come up. He could continue trying to chase werewolf activity in the coming months, but it seemed likely to be a monumental task that would yield little reward; he had no idea how many werewolves there were in the world, but based on how easily the vampires located them for the fights, it was no small amount. Trying to track down a specific one would be exceedingly difficult.

He did not know Leo’s last name. Trying to find a specific Henry Yorke might well be as difficult as trying to find a specific werewolf, and would only help if Hal was using his real name, which he almost certainly wasn’t if he was trying to hide. And unless the truly unthinkable had happened, Nick could only assume that he must be.

But as hopeless as each of these potential paths forward felt, the only other answer to the question “what next?” involved accepting a reality that he was wholly unprepared for.

You’ve done that before, he reminded himself, and quite recently, all things considered.

But it’s different now, a second voice argued, because now I am alone.

Weren’t you already? asked the first.

No, said the second, but without much conviction.

*

The first night Nick passed in the mountain house was a blur. He was not committed enough to sleeping to make up one of the beds, so eventually he passed out on a downstairs sofa just before dawn, when his physical exhaustion finally won out over the mental turmoil that kept him awake. When he rose it was in a state of bleary confusion, because what he thought had roused him surely could not be.

He thought he’d heard the front door.

When he was able to process this thought in full, he leapt from the couch and sped to the foyer.

It was the door he had heard, but it was not Hal who had opened it.

Two people stood before him, a woman and a man, and they all looked at each other in confusion for several moments before the man said, “Who the hell are you?”

“Who the hell are you?” Nick shot back.

The man and woman made eye contact that must have carried some sort of communication, although Nick could not tell what. 

“We’re colleagues of the man who owns this house,” the stranger told Nick, “he lets us use it whenever we wish. Now tell me who the hell you are before I stop asking nicely.”

“Nick Cutler. I’m… a friend. Of his I mean, Hal’s. This is Hal’s house.”

He was not as rested as he would have liked to be for this encounter.

“Nick Cutler…” the man repeated, and there seemed to be some recognition in his tone.

“You?” Nick asked, and the man and woman exchanged a quick nod before the man spoke again.

“I’m Ivan. This is Daisy.”

Nick recognized the names.

Daisy smiled and waved at Nick. She was a striking figure, slim, but noticeably muscular, and her fiery red hair stood out starkly against her deathly pale skin. He was impressed with how intimidating she managed to make her casual greeting.

“I know about you,” Nick said. “I mean, I’ve heard of you. Hal writes to you.”

There had been a few letters from an Ivan Spiteri in the last year, although he seemed to check in much less frequently than many of Hal’s other contacts. There had been no writing from Daisy herself, but she was mentioned in every letter Nick had read.

“On occasion,” Ivan confirmed. “As I said, we are colleagues.”

“You’re an Old One?” Nick guessed. 

Ivan nodded.

“Thought you were all meant to live in some castle or something.”

“Like our dear Lord Hal, I am something of an outlier.”

Nick was surprised that he enjoyed the disrespect Ivan injected into the honorific. It felt like the inflection he would’ve used to tease Hal.

“Where is he?” Daisy asked, her accent thickly Scottish. “He usually lets us know when he’ll be here.”

Nick deflated.

“He’s not here.”

“Then why are you?” Ivan asked.

Nick considered lying or refusing to tell them, but he was too tired to decide what lie to tell, and whatever negative consequences his telling might carry for Hal would require them to locate him first, and there seemed to be very little hope of that.

“He’s missing,” Nick said, and Ivan and Daisy exchanged another glance.

“Missing,” Ivan repeated.

“Yes.”

They seemed to consider asking for further details, but Nick found his desire to converse with them had all but disappeared, and he took their silence as an opportunity to move past them to the terrace without saying another word.

*

Nick stood and watched a significant portion of the sun’s progression into the sky before Ivan appeared next to him on the terrace. 

“Missing?” Ivan questioned.

“Now you know as much as me.” Nick hoped Ivan could tell he was not the target of the bitterness in his voice.

“Hm,” Ivan said, then stuck his hands in his pockets and looked out over the mountains without speaking for some time.

“Not the nicest time to see the Pyrenees,” he commented eventually, and it took Nick a moment to understand this as a reference to the cold weather and not some sort of rebuke of his decision to investigate the house.

“That wasn’t really a factor in my coming,” he responded.

“Of course,” Ivan said, and then, after a pause, “you were looking for him.”

Nick was brushing small rocks back and forth across the stonework of the terrace with his feet. It took him a moment to speak.

“This was my last stop.”

He could feel Ivan watching him. He did not look up.

“Stay with us for a little while then,” Ivan offered, and Nick did meet his gaze then.

“Why?”

Ivan shrugged. “You seem like you need a break. I assume no one is missing you terribly back in Cardiff. Why not?”

Nick considered this for a moment, then shrugged.

*  
Nick was not sure if Ivan and Daisy kept away from him that first day for his sake or their own, but he was grateful for it either way. He was wholly unprepared to have company in his- what emotional state was he even in, he wondered? All the words that leapt to mind- grief, mourning, despair- carried an air of finality that he adamantly refused to grant the situation. 

Despite the chill, he spent much of the day out on the terrace, moving from one spot to the next from time to time, but favoring crossing his legs on the wide, low wall and looking down the steep face of the mountain below.

The ground dropped away quite quickly and suddenly on the other side of the wall, creating a shocking enough sight that Nick’s first thought about it was that the wall’s height was certainly not up to some sort of safety standards. Despite this observation, he was not frightened by it.

It was a cloudy, almost-but-not-quite rainy day, and the house was high enough up the peak that mist gathered below the altitude where Nick sat, thick enough that he could not see much of anything below it. He enjoyed the sense of isolation this effect created, but not the visions it conjured in his mind.

He had so come to associate the unreachable parts of his psyche with a heavy fog that he could not help the image springing into his mind as he gazed out over the Pyrenees. He had not dwelled on this particular scene in some time, in large part because he did truly consider it a memory. He had leapt from the ledge that trapped him in the face of that fearful landscape, and it was a testament to how truly terrified he was of confronting any part of that unknown that he took comfort in the alternative of tumbling endlessly through an abyss.

Except that wasn’t really the choice he had made. When he’d jumped he had not only been trying to get away; he also believed he was falling toward something. Toward Hal.

Now he was just falling.

He tried to construct anything that would stop his descent, something to grab onto or something to slow him down, but to no avail. As he was coming to believe had always been the case, he could do nothing but watch his fate unfold.

*

“Why are you here?” Nick asked Ivan the next day, “I mean why now? In winter?”

“Daisy and I like some solitude. And the intrepid few who attempt to navigate the mountains this time of year are easy to pick off. A lot of old local stories about evil spirits in this area have been revived by us in the last few years.” Ivan smiled as he said this. “A bit over the top, I know, but Daisy enjoys it.”

Nick was only somewhat surprised to find that the conversation did not instill in him the usual hatred he felt toward other vampires when they spoke about killing. It was obvious that, just as Ivan had said, he and Daisy were outliers, and this made him feel close to them, and therefore more understanding.

“Where is Daisy?” 

“Around,” Ivan replied. “She likes to wander. You will see her when you see her.”

Nick and Ivan sat in silence for several moments before Nick decided there was little risk in continuing to ask questions. The worst Ivan would do, surely, was refuse to answer them.

“What is it you do?”

“What do you mean?” Ivan asked.

“Well like how Hal runs-” Nick caught himself. “Ran. Hal ran things in Cardiff. What do you do?”

“Nothing so official,” Ivan answered. “The simple answer is that I do what I like.”

“What’s the complicated answer?”

Ivan smiled.

“Many of my colleagues find me… disagreeable. They would have me gone for good. But appearances are everything. I’ve done nothing truly to warrant such retribution, and being well-traveled has given me allies in large numbers. So any move they make against me, even if they tried to do so secretly, would reflect poorly on them. Very poorly.”

“So…” Nick said, almost unable to believe what he was being told. “You just do whatever you want. Because a lot of people would be pissed off if you died?”

Ivan smiled again. 

“That’s about the sum of it.”

Nick stared. 

“You seem troubled by this,” Ivan remarked.

“Not troubled. Just… shocked. I didn’t think it could be like that.”

“If by ‘it’ you mean vampirism, it can be however you want it to be. It’s certainly a cutthroat world, if you’ll mind the pun, but as long as you can figure out how to navigate it, it is wide open to you.”

Nick was quiet.

“Hal didn’t make it seem that way?” Ivan guessed.

Nick nodded.

“He can be single-minded.”

“That’s one way of saying it,” Nick said.

Ivan said nothing, but kept watching him, and eventually it made Nick uncomfortable enough that he excused himself in what Ivan surely recognized as an effort to escape his observation. Nick liked him even more for not commenting on it.

*

Nick passed a few days at the villa with Ivan and Daisy. He did not want to go back to Cardiff yet, or perhaps ever, and he had no idea what else to do. 

He avoided broaching the topic of Hal after that first day for a great many reasons, but the primary one was simply that he had no desire to continue thinking about it. It was always on his mind, always near the forefront, and there was no need to expand its influence by speaking it out loud.

Four days after their arrival, Ivan informed Nick that they would be leaving, and he realized he didn’t want them to at the same time as he realized that he did not want to go with them either.

He assumed it hardly mattered what he wanted; even if he had wished to follow them, he suspected that no matter how kind they’d been to him so far, they would not allow it.

In the days they stayed at the house they had not asked him to hunt with them, and he had not asked if he could. He did not want to, and he suspected they did not want him there, and for this same reason he would now have to tell them goodbye.

He was standing outside on the terrace again, despite the fact that the temperature was falling every day, when Ivan, again, came to speak to him.

“We’ll be off soon.”

“Where to?”

Ivan shrugged. Nick shook his head incredulously. He still could not believe they led such carefree lives. He still could not believe they were permitted to.

“What will you do?” Ivan asked, and Nick sighed.

“I don’t know. Back to Cardiff I guess, at least for now. That’s the only place I know anybody and. Well. I don’t know what else I would do.”

Ivan nodded. He looked over the view with an expression that in just a few days Nick had learned was pensive.

“You know,” he began, “whatever it was Hal told you about why he recruited you, he meant it.”

Nick looked up. Ivan met his gaze. Nick could not read his expression.

“Why do you say that?” he asked finally.

“I know how it is. You know, I recruited Daisy.”

Nick’s eyes widened. He did not know why that possibility hadn’t occurred to him or why he found it surprising, but he was less concerned with either of these details than with why Ivan was telling him.

“It’s a serious thing, recruiting, especially when you’re an Old One. I’m sure he acted quite cool about it, but trust me. He did not do it lightly. I am sure you already know that much. But you’re lost, and that’s why I’m saying this. You don’t need to be. I am certain Hal Yorke told you something about why he chose you.”

Nick thought back to the cell in Liverpool that felt like a place he’d been in another life. A history-maker, Hal had said. And then again, on the road to Cardiff, the rain pounding loudly on the roof of the car in his memory just as it had that evening when Hal told him that someday he would be someone.

“He mentioned something.”

Ivan seemed to always be aware of exactly when to ask questions and when not to. He did not push Nick to elaborate.

“Whatever it was that he saw in you,” he said instead, “it was there before him and it’s still there now. You don’t need him. I know it’s hard, him being gone. I’m sorry. I can’t imagine why he did it or why he didn’t tell you about it. But you don’t need him, Nick.”

Nick started severely at the use of his first name. Ivan raised an eyebrow.

“Sorry,” Nick said hurriedly, “sorry it’s just. Nothing. I’m sorry.”

He stared pointedly at the mountain opposite the one on which they stood. Ivan stared pointedly at him.

“Take care, Nick,” Ivan said, and disappeared back into the house, and Nick knew that when he went inside they would be gone, and he felt like he should have taken the opportunity to say goodbye, but he also had a sense that Ivan hadn’t expected it.

*

Nick planned to stay another day in the mountains before starting back to Cardiff, but with Ivan and Daisy gone he realized he felt trapped and stifled in the remote home. The echoes that had assaulted him when he first entered were back, along with the suffocating stillness that followed when the noise ceased. It became unbearable within an hour, so that afternoon he packed up what little had brought with him and made the climb down to the car he’d rented in Perpignan. 

Returning to Cardiff made him nervous, but he hoped the foes he knew were better than the ones he hadn’t met yet. 

The house was empty when he returned, and he had to work very hard to convince himself to head to the funeral parlor right away rather than putting off speaking to anyone else for as long as he possibly could, which he knew was a desire that would never go away no matter how much he was able to drag out his isolation. He would have to train himself to ignore it.

When he walked into the lobby of the business, several people stopped and looked up. This was not unusual, but something about the way it happened this time made him squirm. One of the observers was Dennis, and he appeared to be the only member of Hal’s inner circle present, so Nick met his eye and nodded toward the back room, then went there himself without checking if Dennis followed.

He was somewhat surprised, but glad, to find that he did without any further coaxing.

“Where the bloody hell have you been?” Dennis said.

“Searching,” Nick answered, “where do you think?”

Dennis’ expression suggested that perhaps he had not thought.

“And?” he said, his voice somewhat hopeful, “you find anything?”

Interesting, Nick thought to himself. He had assumed all the vampires would be acting the way they had when he’d informed them of Hal’s disappearance; as if, once they’d accepted that it, they’d decided not to care. Dennis’ eagerness to hear news of Hal was unexpected.

Unfortunately, all Nick could say was, “Nothing.”

Dennis looked disappointed.

“I went to all the properties he owns. The ones still standing at least. I didn’t find him. I didn’t find anything. What have you lot been up to?”

Dennis looked surprised to be asked.

“Just keepin’ on, really,” he said. “Everyone’s got their jobs you know, so we just been going about it.”

From the tone of his voice, Nick suspected that Dennis hoped this was a temporary state of affairs. 

“No one has taken over?”

“Are you thick?” Dennis asked, which Nick found more than a little amusing.

“I suppose,” he said drily, “but explain to me why you think so.”

“No one is gonna waltz in here and take over for Lord Hal.”

“Huntington tried to do it while he was still here,” Nick pointed out.

“And look where he ended up,” Dennis said, which Nick supposed was a good point.

“It’s gonna need to be longer than a a few months before anyone wants to take that risk,” Dennis said, “and even then, good luck to them.”

Nick raised an eyebrow. He wondered at Dennis’ own lack of ambition. As much as they were ill-equipped to wield it, it did seem that the other vampires craved power. They had given Hal their loyalty when he earned it, but he assumed they were more than prepared to jump into his shoes the moment he vacated them. Nick was surprised he hadn’t come back to find Fergus in charge.

“So that’s it then?” Nick said, “we just carry on?”

“Seems that way,” Dennis confirmed. 

Nick nodded and turned to leave. He paused at the door. He had begun to get an inkling of something as he spoke to Dennis, and he wanted to test his burgeoning theory.

“If you happen to see Fergus,” he said, wondering even as he did so whether it was wise, “send him my way, will you?”

Dennis looked puzzled, but he nodded.

Nick let the door fall shut behind him and exited the funeral parlor again, and as he passed through the lobby he realized what was new about the gathered vampires’ stares.

In the past, they’d always been directed at Hal.

*

Nick had no expectation of actually seeing Fergus. He returned to the house and sat down in his usual armchair in Hal’s study and wondered what he should do next. 

Ivan’s advice to him had not left him alone, but despite its constant repetition in his head he could not figure out how to act on it. He was still brooding over it when he heard the door to the study open and stood up and turned around quickly to see Fergus walk through it.

“You wanted to see me?” Fergus said, and Nick almost whistled to himself. He’d been right.

“Yeah,” he said, “thought you’d wanna know I went looking for Hal. Didn’t find him.”

“I figured out that much you-”

Fergus cut himself off. Nick could hardly believe it. 

“And?” Fergus said, and it was almost comforting to hear him sound irritated at Nick again.

“Guess I just wanted to see how everyone was carrying on. I got worried it might be chaos.”

“How-” he stopped again. “Everything’s good,” he said instead.

Nick nodded. “That’s it then,” he said, and allowed himself a smile at how quickly Fergus accepted the offer to leave the room.

After Fergus left, Nick did whistle, long and slow, and sat back down in the chair with a heavy thump as he mostly left his descent to gravity.

A void of power was a problem, Hal had told him, and he was beginning to understand exactly what kind of problem it was. What he’d witnessed before, with Huntington, had been the opposite; too much power concentrated in one place. An abundance of leadership, not a lack. And while he did not doubt that in time they would fall to bickering and infighting over who should take Hal’s place, it seemed that Dennis had been right; no one was eager to step up yet. They would no doubt be averse to being led by whoever eventually took up Hal’s mantle, but they did not want to do the leading either. 

It seemed, much to Nick’s chagrin, that he had even more in common with them than he’d though; Hal’s departure had left all of them idling.

Nick picked up a decorative glass orb from the table in front of his armchair and began to twirl it around in his hand. He stared at the reflection it created on the floor and on the shelves, stared through it at the distorted wood that resulted from its influence on his vision. He observed his own faint, warped face looking back up at him. It had surprised him, when he changed, to learn that his image could still be captured in some surfaces, so long as they were far from being mirrors. Vampires were permitted to see themselves, apparently, if only in hazy glimpses.  
He stared at his misshapen partial reflection. The ripples in the glass prevented him from being able to look himself in the eye. He spent several moments trying to defy physics with little success.

When he finally abandoned this effort, Nick looked up at the desk. He had not sat down behind it when he came into the room because he had never done so before, and even though its usual occupant was gone, he still did not feel capable of taking that liberty. He did after some time, however, get up and get a pen and some paper out of the top drawer. He sat back down in the armchair and smoothed the paper over the coffee table and began to write.

*

The strange amount of respect Nick had been afforded since he returned amused him a little, but it primarily unnerved him, and he did not want it to last. He’d been asked for direction by other vampires several times in the week since his return, and each time he had refused to provide it, dismissing the asker’s insistence that he was the most logical person to come to.

Hal’s closest, including, of course, Fergus, did not actually look to Nick for any sort of guidance, which he was glad for, because he would have had to take it as a sign of the end times. But they did walk on eggshells around him, unwilling to fully grant him leadership but concerned about how their positions would be affected if he did officially assume it.

It was absurd. Nick knew it mattered that he was Hal’s recruit, but he had no idea it mattered so much. He’d only been a vampire for five years; he was hardly equipped to take over leadership of an entire city’s post-living population.

The longer he went on accepting the vampires’ strained respect with a grimace, the more he felt aware of how different he had always been from them, and how little it had mattered when he had Hal, and how much more it might matter now.

He was grateful that it did not take long for his letter to get a response. He worried when he sent it that he was overstepping somehow, but he decided that the Old Ones would likely appreciate being informed of what had happened. He hoped they would be willing to send a replacement.

Within two weeks they did. The man was called David, and within five minutes of meeting him Nick hated him.

This was unfair, and he knew it. There was nothing particularly wrong with David. Nick could even see why the Old Ones had sent him. He was sharp and shrewd and he did not suffer fools. All traits, in fact, that he shared with Hal. His leadership style, Nick would quickly discover, was not even so unlike Hal’s. On paper, he was a more than adequate replacement.

Realizing this somehow made Nick hate him more.

Everything David did, especially if it was reminiscent of Hal, made Nick angry, and he was not hesitant to show it. After some time he suspected that the fact that he was Hal’s recruit was all that kept him from being unceremoniously kicked to the curb. David spoke highly of Hal– which was also endlessly frustrating to Nick, for reasons he could not figure out– and he said more than once in his first month in Cardiff that he hoped eventually he would see in Nick what Hal had.

Keep looking, Nick thought bitterly each time.

There was an adjustment period following David’s appointment, but it passed far more smoothly than when Hal took over. In a short time, everyone had resumed their routines, and they went back to ignoring Nick most of the time, and he was immensely relieved when they did so.

He was also acutely aware of the fact that all of their routines were able to resume despite Hal’s absence. Even the dog fights continued, once David found a new werewolf. Nick felt quite certain that he was the only person whose life had been left with a massive, unfillable hole.

Despite his belief that it was less than useless to do so, Nick kept up with news of werewolf attacks, and he kept an eye out for anything that might lead him to a Leo or a Hal who had recently appeared somewhere out of the blue, but week after week, month after month, he came up with nothing.

When he started to operate under the assumption that Hal was dead, he wasn’t sure if it was because he really thought he must be or because it was easier to believe in this reality than any of the alternatives.

As time passed around him, he recalled more and more often the advice Ivan had given him, and subsequently, always, his first meeting with Hal.

He made no conscious decision that he would follow through on Hal’s plans for him; it felt, rather, like they were his own plans. He did not know how, and he did not know when, but he became convinced that someday he would make his mark. Someday he would be a history maker.

Until then, he would remain among the people he despised, if for no other reason than because it was where Hal had put him.

*

…

…

…

…

…

…

…

…

…

…

…

…

…

…

…

…

…

*

After fifty-some-odd years, Nick felt qualified to state that the defining feature of eternal life, despite what he’d been promised, was monotony. There had been a technology boom at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st that he found fascinating, and constant new products and services that advanced at a speed he never would have imagined, but he found himself to be the only vampire interested in this. It made the other vampires that much more frustrating to him, because he found their lack of motivation to engage in the modern world at best short-sighted and at worst the failing that would lead to their downfall. But he did like to imagine that he was the only eighty-five-year-old early adopter of Twitter.

These forays into the world of tech, however, were a distraction. His life was still serving as solicitor for the Cardiff-based vampires, a position which, short of the occasional amusing confrontation amongst the underlings, was exceedingly boring.

Until the Box Tunnel Massacre.

News always traveled fast among vampires, even without the aid of modern technology, and most vampires knew almost as soon as they heard about the murders that it was John Mitchell who had committed them.

Nick had heard whispering about the man Mitchell before, but he generally dismissed it as idle gossip. It had piqued his interest to hear, a few months before the massacre, that he was leading a group of Bristol’s vampires to go off blood and live dry, but the whispers that made it to Cardiff were faint, and everyone dismissed them as intense hyperbole, if not outright fabrication. Nick had, at that time, no reason to doubt that this was the case.

But then the Box Tunnel Massacre.

It was a scandal the scale of which Nick could not have imagined, and he found himself, for the first time in his half a century of vampirism, closely following its internal politics.

He wished many times in the weeks following the news to ask questions, but if he had loathed seeming ignorant to Hal, it was absolutely intolerable to seem ignorant before anyone else he now associated with. So he did what he’d learned to do very well in the last fifty years; he laid low and listened intently. This method of investigating got him information in bits and pieces, and out of order, but over time he was able to put together the details. 

The most stunning fact of the story, to Nick, was that the rumors about John Mitchell’s blood-free community had been true. He had, for a short time at least, convinced a group of vampires to live not only without killing, but without drinking at all. At least equally shocking was the fact that this reality came about because Mitchell himself had been trying, if not always successfully, to live without blood for years. He had roommates who were not vampires, who were in fact a werewolf and a ghost, and he lived with them among humans, like humans, trying to be normal.

It was incredible, Nick thought. Or it would have been, if it had worked. The consensus among the other vampires was that Mitchell had always been a fool, and the collapse of his phony human life had been imminent since he began the charade, and whatever Nick felt about the effort Mitchell had made, hindsight seemed to suggest that this assessment was correct. The whole enterprise had fallen apart in spectacular fashion, and the mess that had resulted had every vampire in Britain on edge, and probably others besides.

It took some time for the details of who else was involved to get through to Nick, but when they reached him the whole situation began to feel much more personal.

He learned first that Daisy had taken part in the massacre with Mitchell. He learned second that she had done so because Ivan had been killed.

How Ivan had died was a part of the story that remained fuzzy for Nick for some time, but he did not have to know the specifics to feel grief. He grew very depressed for several days, a period of time he realized was quite possibly longer than the amount of time he’d actually spent with the man on the one occasion that they met. 

It surprised him, how much sadness he felt for someone he had sort of known once, decades ago, but he supposed there was no one else in his life who had enough of his care and regard to warrant his grief, and perhaps stores of it had been building up for years, waiting for something worth reacting to.

He was not glad to find that Ivan was a sufficient catalyst.

The night Nick learned of his death, he found himself wishing Ivan well in the afterlife, before realizing what a ridiculous thought this was. Ivan had been dead for hundreds of years. Every vampire saw the other side when they were made, before they were spat back into the realm they’d come from, and their doors did not come back again. This was afterlife, what they had, and whatever other kind might exist for everyone else, Nick felt certain that there was no next step for people like him.

They were known for their eternal life and they were the only people whose existence could be so permanently snuffed out.

Nick looked up at the surprisingly clear sky over Cardiff that night and could not help falling back into old beliefs about the heavens and where they were contained. He tried to look past the moon and stars and into the emptiness that lay beyond them, and as he did he felt that he was looking into all the future could possibly hold for Ivan or for himself or for anyone else this grim topic brought to his mind.

He sent up his good wishes anyway.

*

It seemed, for a brief time, that the fallout from the Box Tunnel killings was dealt with. 

It became apparent very quickly that it was not.

Just as before, Nick gleaned only snippets of the story in the wrong order, so he did not realize how severely John Mitchell had upset the vampires until he heard that the Old Ones were coming to deal with it.

Soon after, he learned what dealing with it meant.

Nick had frequently heard vampires talk about taking over the world. He knew most of them weren’t joking, as ridiculous as the concept was. But he assumed that even though they were serious, they were serious in the way of someone who says they are going to backpack across the continent one day; all genuine desire and no real intent.

Then he was told that the Old Ones were coming to start the process.

He laughed out loud when Louis, who had taken over for David some twenty years previous, informed the core group in Cardiff. Everyone stared.

“Sorry,” he said, trying and failing not to keep laughing. “It’s just. You really think this is going to happen?”

Everyone stared more, and Nick finally managed to stop finding it so amusing.

“Yes,” Louis said, “I do. Because it is. I know you think because one of them recruited you that you know all there is to know about the Old Ones-”

“I don’t,” Nick interjected.

“-but you don’t. Hal was just one of them, and not even one of the best. And he’s gone. This is what’s happening. Are you getting with the program?”

Nick stood up straight and saluted with the wrong hand.

“Yes sir.”

Louis rolled his eyes, but let the matter drop. As the vampires dispersed, Nick glared at his back. Louis always did this; finding any opportunity he could to work in a jab at Hal. Nick had once only half-jokingly asked him where was his respect for the dead, and he’d said it was with the ones who were still worth a shit. No matter how little Nick liked or cared for the man, he always managed to make his remarks sting.

It was bizarre to Nick that a man who believed vampires could take over the world had that kind of power to affect him.

Maybe he was right after all, Nick thought wryly as he left the funeral parlor to make his way back to the house.

And then stopped dead in his tracks in the middle of the street.

Maybe he _was_ right after all.

He waved apologetically and hurried on when a driver honked at him, but he was barely conscious of these actions. His mind was reeling. Hal’s voice, frequently in his thoughts but never so loudly as it used to be, was back in full force, repeating that oft-recalled phrase.

A history-maker.

Nick did not think he had been wrong to jeer at the vampires’ plans; they would go poorly, without a doubt, because vampires knew nothing about humanity and thought they didn’t need to. But Nick was not like other vampires. He knew what the rest of them did not. He knew what it would take to make this wild dream a reality.

*

Nick was not quite clear on how Barry became the new hub of vampiric activity beyond the fact that it was where John Mitchell had run to, but it made little difference to him. He had no particular emotional connection to Cardiff, despite having resided there for over half a century. He had little emotional attachment to anything these days, except perhaps in the form of a fervor for the plan he had developed. Barry would suit his needs as well as anywhere.

He’d started laying the groundwork as soon as he’d formed the idea; it would take time to implement, and he would need more resources in its later stages, but all he needed to get started was the internet.

He began by planting vague rumors in various online communities, including causing a serious stir in the subreddit devoted to werewolves, the only rule of which was, amusingly, that werewolves were not real. He was quite pleased with the following he gathered when he abandoned the ashes of the argument he started there to lead his own subreddit about how werewolves were definitely real, to which he took a very hands-off approach after getting a regular exchange going between some hardcore believers who he trusted would more than maintain the conversation.

He counted this activity as a roaring success, but it was very much just the beginning. He’d been on every social media site that had as yet existed, and he knew that anyone could find a few people to fervently and vocally support absolutely any idea they had just as well as he knew that the vast majority would write that small group off as idiots or crazy or, most likely, both. He needed this tiny, devoted community in place to evangelize for him as he worked to expand his reach, but he was not under the impression they would convince anyone else any sooner than he would. But it was not, at least as yet, about convincing. It was only about whispering loudly enough that, even if people dismissed the concept outright, it had crossed their minds.

It was in these early stages that he became, if never actually outright involved in the biggest vampire dramas of the day, at least present for them. There was apparently, as he’d vaguely understood before, a hierarchy within the Old Ones, and some of those with less status had been sent ahead to, in one of their words, “manage the fallout of the botched Box Tunnel investigation,” which Nick felt was not entirely fair to say, considering when they said “botched” they were referring to a detective solving the crime. But as with most things vampires did, it made him little difference.

For Nick, the most fascinating part of the saga, all the way to the end, was the vampire John Mitchell. 

It took a bit of time for the remaining vampires to hear about Mitchell’s death because it coincided with the death of the Old One Wyndham, who had gone to Mitchell’s home to collect him. As Nick understood it, George Sands, the werewolf who was, bizarrely, Mitchell’s best friend, had killed him upon his own request, then killed Wyndham before he could leave their house. Nick came away from this tale very impressed with this George Sands, but even more in awe of Mitchell. 

Any one detail he’d heard about the man was something he never thought he’d hear about a vampire; the sum total of his story was almost impossible to believe. No wonder Ivan had run with him, Nick thought with a twinge of regret. He’d been a renegade. He did not sound like he’d been the most pragmatic person or the best planner, or even particularly good at anything he undertook, but he’d made himself a life outside of vampirism, and he’d gotten other vampires to follow. Nick had heard by then that the betrayal of a human woman was the primary catalyst for Mitchell’s rampage on the underground, and the impulsivity and emotional volatility that chain of events suggested tracked with everything else he’d been told about the man. But still.

He’d had his friends, of course. George Sands the werewolf, another werewolf, and a ghost Nick had heard was something of a legend for first refusing death and then coming back from beyond with Mitchell’s help. It was staggering. They were all of them impossibilities, each with an individual story that defied all expectation, but together a conflagration of too many unimaginable lives to fathom. But they existed. All the time that Nick had been what he had been, he couldn’t help but think, there might have been people like this. Vampires like that.

But, he reminded himself, not anymore. Any romanticizing he might begin to do of Mitchell’s life always ended quickly when he remembered the gorier details, particularly that of the attack on the Bristol vampires that killed Ivan. Mitchell had tried to make good with humanity and inadvertently gotten a good man killed. His deviation painted a huge target on his back, and while his death on his own terms could be considered an escape, it was also an end, and a reminder that such action would not be without consequence. Nick never forgot this for long.

So however appealing it might sound to him to follow in the footsteps of this rebellion, he knew it would be a fool’s choice to do so. He had not sat around listening to the likes of Fergus babble inanely for over fifty years just to throw away his life now, in some sort of meaningless gesture. The Old Ones were coming, and Nick planned to have something to show them.

*

When Griffin took over for Wyndham Nick was appalled to find he liked him the least of all the pompous, fussy leaders he’d dealt with over the years. 

He introduced himself to Griffin, as he did to everyone he met, as Hal’s recruit. He told himself he did this because he knew it would mean something to them, not because he wanted it to. Whatever his motivation, it did not have the desired effect on Griffin. He did not even shake Nick’s offered hand.

Nick knew then that he had his work cut out for him.

The vampire hub in Barry was not a funeral parlor or a bar, but an old shipping warehouse. Nick rolled his eyes every time he saw its name, or heard it, or thought about it. It was a wonder vampires managed to stay hidden, given their inability to be subtle.

But while he found Stoker Imports nearly intolerable as a concept, the building itself was as good of a location as any. It was certainly not the luxurious accommodations Hal would no doubt have demanded, but Nick was not bothered by this. Something about seeing gatherings of vampires sitting on discarded folding chairs in a building that was near to falling down felt more appropriate than most of the locales he witnessed them in. The only downside was how much it reminded him of the warehouse where the Cardiff dogfights had been hosted, a fact which was not helped by the cage they used to hold human captives on a regular basis. But even this he tried to spin into a positive. Perhaps having the fights on his mind would keep werewolves in his consciousness more broadly, and prevent him ever straying from his plan.

There was little danger of this anyway, but he did not have to remind himself of that.

The biggest challenge he had to contend with in those days was the other vampires’ short-sighted insistence on killing any werewolf they caught wind of.

The moderate respect he had for John Mitchell made him feel a twinge of guilt when he first had the thought that one of the werewolves he had lived with would be perfect for the later stages of his plan, but just a twinge. He was working toward something bigger than any of them, and if he avoided letting himself dwell on what exactly that would be and if he would like it when it happened, well, that was just being practical. He was long past spending any mental energy on what-ifs.

Unfortunately, the first time the woman werewolf left the house after giving birth, Griffin ordered a gang of vampires to kill her.

Nick ran after Griffin following his announcement of this plan, hating the man more every second for how clear he made his disinterest in anything Nick had to say.

“Are you sure this is the right thing to do?” Nick said, every few words interrupted by a quick, shallow breath as he hurried to keep up. 

“It is wildly inappropriate for you to even ask me that question,” Griffin said.

“I would’ve asked Hal,” Nick replied, and knew instantly it was a mistake.

Griffin stopped. He turned to look Nick in the face.

“I couldn’t give less of a shit how Hal let you treat him. You won’t do it to me.”

“I just think if you considered the bigger picture-”

But Griffin turned around and started to walk away again, and Nick trailed off instead of following. 

The next day the woman, Nina, was murdered, and Nick found himself willing George Sands to hole up in his house for as long as he could.

*

Nick was never requested to be part of Griffin’s high-level planning meetings, but he managed to be there for all of them anyway. He wasn’t sure if Griffin just thought him irrelevant enough that it did not matter what he heard or didn’t hear or if he had some sort of intended role for Nick that would eventually become apparent. He did not like either possibility, but he hoped it was the former, because it better suited his purposes, at least for the time being, to be uninteresting. 

When Griffin had told them that they would need to prepare a tribute for the Old Ones, Nick was delighted. His plan was already in the works, and all he needed to do was reach a major milestone before the Old Ones arrived to have a more than adequate welcoming gift. He knew where George Sands was and he would find a way to get to him. The zealots who had followed him from his troublemaking in the werewolf subreddit were still devoutly running the group he had started himself, and the twitter account he created for posting werewolf evidence was gaining followers every day. They were still widely undesirable as individuals, of course, but it still wasn’t about who, it was about how many. And their numbers were growing.

He was not sure how he was going to get access to George Sands, but in the meantime he worked to keep the rumors flowing, as well as looking out for any indication that there might be other, more easily accessible werewolves nearby that could serve his purpose.

There was a frenetic energy to everything the vampires did in those days. It was them who would bring about the end times, but they lived as if some sort of judgment was coming from on high. It was possible Nick had just been shielded from this kind of behavior before, for various reasons, but he didn’t think that was so. The climate was new, and it was one of feverish anticipation. 

Some vampires were already recruiting more readily, which Griffin discouraged, but not very harshly. One of them recruited a boy so young that when he saw him Nick felt a pang of old feeling in his chest that, if he had considered it, he would have known was grief for a lost future. The newly dead introduced himself as Dewi, and Nick shook his hand and tried to play along with everyone else’s insistence that the poor child had been given a gift.

It was chaotic, but it was activity, and after years and years of excruciating boredom, Nick couldn’t say he minded the change. 

*

Nick’s plan was a good one. He knew this. No one could tell him otherwise. It was good, and it would work, but he knew if he spoke of it too soon he would be laughed out of the planning committee. 

If there was anything he knew about vampires, it was that you could not count on them to recognize a good idea.

Every time Griffin spoke of the imminent vampire takeover, Nick had to work hard to keep his mouth shut. Unlike his plan, Griffin’s was a bad one that wouldn’t work. Vampires’ inflated sense of their own importance and abilities would be as essential to their downfall as their short-sightedness, he decided. At least, they would be without his involvement.

But he was involved, and the fact that he was working away at his own ideas in private made it somewhat less frustrating when his concerns about the efficacy of the vampires’ tactics were dismissed. 

Somewhat.

Over time the frustration grew, and when Griffin described the Old Ones storming across Britain as if they would not be immediately halted and killed if they attempted it, he decided he’d had enough.

He maintained his composure to quip about the need for crossbows and catapults, but it deteriorated as he laid into Regus, that hack, who he did not even dislike particularly, but who had the unfortunate luck of holding one of the most ridiculous positions Nick had ever heard of. 

“You people are obsessed with history,” he groaned at the committee, and the irony of him making this complaint did occur to him, but he did not examine it any more closely than he examined most thoughts that led back to Hal.

He wasn’t wrong, he decided; it was one of those times where it seemed like two things contradicted, but they did not, really. In fact, it made perfect sense for him to abhor the vampires’ constant nostalgia and self-aggrandizing at the same time as he was positioning himself to be a part of that saga. It made sense, he told himself, because he would be a new chapter. 

Aside from Dracula- who Nick had learned sometime in the last fifty years had in fact existed and had in fact been a vampire, although he had long been proper dead- most vampires that were considered historically significant amongst their kin were _only_ significant amongst their kin. They had killed or recruited a lot of people, and maybe they held some minor position of power in the human world, but the former was rare. If the history Regus kept involved people who Nick thought were worth keeping a history about, perhaps he would not be so dismissive. But it was a history of people who had managed not to be killed for long enough to do a great deal of killing themselves, and there were almost no other achievements to be marked throughout vampire lore.

He supposed many of them were trying to change that; this wasn’t the first time a world domination plan had gotten legs. But they had all failed, for all the reasons Nick had half-shouted at Griffin in that meeting. He was going to be different. He was going to be memorable for something new.

Griffin’s lukewarm reaction to his very brief and undetailed description of his plan was not ideal, but nothing that he hadn’t expected. He hadn’t been planning on putting it out there yet anyway; he just ended up in a situation where it made sense to do so. Whether anyone else got on board at this stage did not particularly matter.

And when Dewi burst into the room and told them hurriedly how he had created a perfect opportunity to capture George Sands, Nick knew his time was truly on its way.

*

When Griffin made plans to use Dewi’s ruse to kidnap the baby werewolf, Nick made sure he was not involved in them. This was not difficult considering how little Griffin wanted him to be involved in anything, at all, ever.

There was another werewolf, Dewi had said, a young man named Tom, and it was this man he had passed the false information to. The assumption was that George would follow the lead to kill Griffin, leaving his house guarded only by the ghost. For the others this meant getting in and getting the baby. For Nick, it meant the next step in his plan.

On the night of the full moon he slipped away from the chaotic preparations without anyone noticing.

It was a bit of a walk to the warehouse where Dewi had directed Tom, but Nick was not interested in any other form of transportation. The early evening air was pleasant, despite some less than enjoyable smells wafting up from the sea to his left, and he felt like he so rarely got to really be on his own since the move to Barry.

The walk became, if not less pleasant, at least less carefree, when it began to remind him of a walk he took in Cardiff fifty years before.

Nick believed he thought about Hal a reasonable amount; for many years he would say it had not been too often, and without too much emotion. Lately the frequency of the thoughts had been increasing, and sometimes they carried feeling with them.

Perhaps the particular memory of what had, at the time, been quite possibly a walk to Hal’s death, was bound to stir up something more than casual reaction. Perhaps that degree of emotion was just becoming more common as the winds shifted. Change was coming, had already come, and Nick was learning that it was much easier to keep certain thoughts on lockdown when he carried out the same routine day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year. 

Now there were endless opportunities for unexpected moments to stir up memories, and for those memories to stir up something else. One of the things they were frequently stirring up was an uncomfortable question of why Nick was doing what he was doing.

He could list plenty of reasons, and he mostly believed them. They were good reasons. But the one he did not like to admit to himself, because of the hold it meant a memory had on him, was that he was doing it for Hal.

He could not, of course, really be doing it for Hal. Hal was dead. Hal had to be dead. So there was nothing to be done for him, and Nick knew it. But he was fulfilling Hal’s wishes for him, and that was not a thought he liked all that much, because the more time passed since Hal disappeared the more he felt like that short period of his life should not still affect him so.

Something about the situation suddenly made Nick short of breath, and he knew he needed to ground himself in the moment before he drifted away. It was a technique he had practiced often over the decades, and part of what made him realize that routine was the antidote to too much thinking. He’d been in the dark since that first dogfight, since he’d jumped into his life with Hal in a real way, and at first he had thought that meant nothing could reach him. But as the years passed, he began to feel like Alice in the Disney film, falling through a vortex full of dizzying objects on all sides, except where she might have passed a rocking chair or a grandfather clock, he was passing miniature rooms full of recollections. 

He tried to pull his focus away from the places among this noise where Hal resided, places that dragged up that dog fight, and the other dog fights, and Cardiff in the early fifties, and the house and the funeral parlor and-

No. He was approaching the place where he planned to veer off the road and come at the warehouse through the woods so that he would not be seen. He felt the shift under his feet from pavement to grass, and he focused on it. He felt the soft brush of leaves against his skin as he entered the small grove of trees, and he focused on it. He felt the little bit of sea spray that the wind managed to carry so far from the actual sea, and he focused on it. He let the environment overwhelm the visions of the past until the sheet metal warehouse wall was before him, and he had something new to focus on.

The were still two human men inside the building, which Nick only knew because he heard words being shouted instead of screams of agony or animal howls. He remained out of sight while this carried on, listening to George lay into Tom about how he’d been lied to, and then a great many other things that did not seem particularly relevant, the way that people lash out when they are not actually angry at one person for one thing but at the entire world for a great many things.

Then the other screaming started.

Nick gave it a moment before he moved to the small window and looked in.

The men were both on the floor, still mostly human, but the change had begun.

Nick pulled out his phone and started recording. There was no chance of him being noticed now; the men’s attention was entirely on their transformation. He watched it on his phone screen, so he could be sure of getting good shots. When they had changed completely and there was no chance they’d remember him if they saw him, he whistled for their attention. He needed the best footage he could get.

The wolves turned and lunged at him, but they could not, of course, get to him, and he had to laugh, not because it was funny or because he liked doing it, but out of joy, because his plan was going to work.

*

The baby was not a werewolf.

This apparently meant something.

It sent Regus into a tizzy that he would not explain until he had pulled out his grotesque holy scripture, and Nick had not known there were vampire prophecies but as soon as it was revealed to him he felt like he should have guessed. Vampirism leaned heavily on the absurd.

The prophecy gave him pause, but only briefly. It would not impact his plans, he decided. He was certain that as a prediction of the future it meant nothing, but he had allowed himself a moment to consider if the stock the Old Ones would place in it might impact his intentions. But it would not, he concluded, not in the least because Griffin was certainly going to kill the child before Nick could incorporate her into his plan in any way.

He remained mostly a silent observer as Griffin set out to deal with the baby, the War Child, and when everything began to go sideways he knew he was going to run. It was not cowardice, and he was not worried that it was. It was self-preservation, and it was smart. He had no intention of risking his life for a baby that he knew could not be anything other than symbolic, and who carried very little weight even as a token. So when Griffin’s plan wrought chaos, he snuck out of the warehouse before George or the Tom or the ghost set their sights on him, quiet and quick, thinking as he witnessed George assault Griffin that really, this might even turn out to be a positive for him.

*

With Griffin gone, the frantic energy that consumed the vampire hideout ratcheted up even further. No one made a move to take over, likely because they expected the Old Ones to take command when they showed up. This did not mean, however, that they did not have thoughts on the matter of who should be granted upward mobility, and perhaps even expectations about who would be awarded positions of power.

Nick kept himself out of discussions about this topic, which more often than not devolved into arguments and the occasional serious fight. The others were fools, and they would waste all of their time in a ridiculous power struggle amongst themselves, and they would have nothing to show the Old Ones when they arrived. Nick would.

With not one but two werewolf transformations captured on video, Nick was ready to make bigger moves. Or he should have been. Something was giving him pause.

He knew most people would doubt the video’s authenticity. The things that could be achieved in films these days were beyond anything he would have imagined when he first saw a feature at Woolton Picture House in 1936. People were certain to think it was a hoax, and he was not bothered by that, because in every group of people who saw the video and walked away scoffing, there would be one person, maybe two, who had a different reaction. That’s what Nick was counting on. They would be the people who were on the fence about jumping ship with him on the werewolf reddit, the ones who wanted to think it could all be true but needed just a little bit of something to convince them. 

Believing was not all he needed though, he had to remind himself from time to time. What his plan really relied on was people being afraid, and so far he had not worked as hard to that end as perhaps he should have.

He needed a small scale test of reactions to the video. He needed a focus group.

He knew as soon as he had the thought that it would not be a robustly helpful one. He needed to be discreet for many reasons, and discretion would severely limit his pool of candidates. But any feedback, from anyone, would be more information than he currently had at his disposal to try to gauge what widespread reaction to his video might be. So he gathered the best group he could.

He put up signs around Barry that, for the most part, did not last long before getting torn down. They were vague, but they promised interested parties that they would be paid if they participated in a study at 2 PM on Friday. The payment offered was nothing much, not because Nick was stingy, but because he wanted to avoid attracting too much attention. He gave the address of a different building near the vampires’ primary living space, so as not to bring a bunch of humans descending upon that particular locale without Nick vetting them first.

It all turned out to be less helpful than he had even hoped when Fergus showed up.

Fergus had acquired a crew in Barry. Most of them worked as police officers, like he did, which made Nick hate them more. They hated Nick because Fergus hated Nick, still, quite a great deal, even after all the years it had been since Hal.

Nick felt foolish after the fact, staring at the corpses of his focus group. He needed to keep his business as far away from people like Fergus as possible. They would always interfere with it, intentionally or not. 

What he really needed, he realized some time later, and kicked himself for not realizing before, was access to a werewolf. It was another part of his plan he had somewhat lost sight of, but he realized suddenly that it was essential that he figure out, as soon as possible, how he was going to get a werewolf he could use to his own ends. He did not have to think too hard about where to look. 

*

It was not clear to Nick how Fergus died. His cronies showed up one day without him, and Nick quirked an eyebrow then, but said nothing. But the more days passed in his absence, the more Nick’s curiosity grew, and eventually he barked sharply at one of the less intimidating of Fergus’ group to come speak to him.

“What?” the small man sneered.

“Where is Fergus?”

“Dead, dumbass.”

Nick stared.

“Dead?” he repeated.

“That’s what I said isn’t it?”

“How?”

“Some piece of work at that house where the baby was,” the man said, and Nick walked away without saying anything more.

The only reason he could figure Fergus would’ve gone back to the house was Tom, and it seemed likely that it had also been Tom that killed him. This was no big loss to Nick, but it did mean that Tom was as formidable as he was rumored to be. Nick had suspected from the moment he set his sights on Tom that he would have to earn his trust to make him a part of this plan, and now he was more certain than ever that this was the case. But he still had not figured out how he would do it.

He was thrilled when the opportunity presented itself without any effort on his part.

Thank God, he thought, for Tom’s hatred of vampires.

When he learned of Tom’s arrest, Nick pulled the CCTV footage as quickly as possible and all but ran to the police station.

With the video on hand it was not difficult to get Tom released.

He knew he would have an uphill battle selling himself as trustworthy to a man who’d been raised with an intense hatred of vampires, but getting him released from jail was certainly a good foot to start the relationship on. Tom reacted with the anticipated mistrust when he realized what Nick was, but Nick was thrilled to see that he responded with some openness to his assertion that some vampires, including himself, could be trusted.

Thank God, again, that Tom was easily taken in. In another life Nick would’ve warned him that he ought to train himself out of that instinct.

But now. Well. Needs must.

He left Tom with his card and tried not to break out into a full grin until he was well-away down the street.

*

After Nick got Tom on the hook, thinks progressed quite smoothly, for a while.

When the coroner told him that someone had come after her with the knowledge that she had faked her findings about the Box Tunnel massacre, Nick was quite upset, but he hoped that the situation was dealt with by her murder. It was unfortunate, Nick thought, that the situation had to be handled this way, but this new detail made it unavoidable. 

In the aftermath, as he looked at the corpse and wondered what to do with it, he had a thought that did not feel like it came from his own mind.

Take her to the reservoir.

He almost looked around to see who had said it.

He and Hal had frequented the Upper Neuadd Reservoir when they began regularly killing together. It was an ideal dumping ground, Hal had said, and Nick did not mind the opportunities the site provided for him to go on a getaway with Hal, however small. It was always just the two of them; Hal never brought anyone else.

Take her there, some voice in his head said again. 

Nick had not gone there since Hal.

He stared at the body for a while longer, wincing at the blood that was beginning to congeal around it. He needed to get her gone, and he had no better ideas for how to do it, so he steeled himself and went to look for a tarp.

It was… eerie, he decided, taking paths he had not taken in over fifty years. The closer he got to the reservoir, the less seemed to have changed. It made sense; the reason they used the site was because of its isolation, because of the very small chance of the bodies being found, at least in a timely manner. 

Still. Seeing how the landscape appeared almost frozen in time unsettled him for reasons he refused to interrogate. 

Nick pulled the coroner’s body from his rented Fiat and dragged it some distance into the open field between the road and the water. He found a spot with decently soft earth and left the corpse while he returned to the car to get a shovel.

He wasn’t being careful, he chided himself as he made more tracks between his very conspicuously parked car and the place where he would bury the body. He wasn’t being careful, but he realized he did not intend to start. No one would tie the murder to him even if the crime was discovered, and to be stealthier would take more time that he did not feel like wasting. He would obscure any muddy footprints that he left at least enough to avoid his shoes being identified. There really were no other precautions needed.

As he thought this he felt like he heard someone clicking their tongue repeatedly in what he realized was a tsk, and as soon as he understood this he knew what would come next.

Always take every precaution that you can, Hal’s voice said in his mind. There are none that are unnecessary.

Nick paused a few feet from the coroner’s body and stood very still for several minutes. He thought he was being still, at least. In time he realized his hands were shaking.

When Hal first left, his voice came to Nick this way often. The instructions and advice he had given over the years had not only been burned into his brain, they had been burned into his brain with Hal’s cadence, Hal’s intonation, Hal’s inflection. For months, perhaps even years, if Nick was honest with himself, everything he did was accompanied by a ghostly Hal telling him how he should do it, or what he was forgetting, or why it was important. It made him realize just how much Hal had influenced every part of his life; there was no task, no daily activity or practice that he could undertake that did not invoke that voice. 

In time, however, it had faded. Or so he had thought. Perhaps, he realized as he stood in the barrens noticing that his sweaty palms were slipping on the shovel, perhaps it had not gone at all, but become so mundane that he no longer noticed it. Perhaps Hal still directed him throughout his days in a voice Nick no longer recognized as belonging to him. Except now, more and more, there were new things happening, things that had not happened once in fifty-five years, and now Nick needed a level of guidance, of advising, that he had not required in a long time.

And although he was surely long dead, apparently it would come from Hal.

Nick returned to himself, standing in the field with a body and a shovel, and decided that it did not matter if he thought in Hal’s voice; this must merely be the result of years of constant contact with one man and almost no one else. His current thoughts were still certainly his own, his ideas sprung fully from his own brain, and dead men had no power over him.

At least not anymore.

He lost himself in the familiar action of digging, and when he had prepared a shallow grave for the coroner he rolled her into it, then covered her up again with dirt. He stood and leaned against the shovel when he was done and stared at the sun setting across the water. I am here, he thought, in his own voice this time, and I am doing this myself. I am doing this for myself, as much as for him. More for me than him. I will succeed or fail by my own merits, not his.

He repeated some variation on this theme over and over until he convinced at least a small part of himself that he believed it.

*

The death of the coroner meant the public would have suspicions about the reality of the Box Tunnel killings again, and especially about the part of the story he’d planted. For some it would no doubt make the reality of werewolves more believable, but the public who were less prone to the fantastic would be more skeptical than ever. 

It meant that he needed to accelerate his plans.

If no werewolves in Barry were killing, he would have to make it seem like they were.

He toyed with the idea of harvesting some blood from his staged werewolf kills, two birds with one stone, but then he thought better of it. Their blood loss needed to be consistent with animal attack and nothing else. This was, ultimately, fine with him. There was always plenty of extra stock in the fridge at the warehouse, and apart from the necessary ending of the coroner’s life he had not killed in some time, a situation he was quite all right with. Until now, he’d had more important things to do.

He found people who might reasonably be out at night near the woods and he killed a few of them on the full moon. He brought tools that would allow him to ensure their wounds were consistent with werewolf attacks. He splayed their bodies in ways that suggested they had been discarded carelessly. He thought of taking pictures, but dismissed this idea as well. The information journalists would provide, however uninformed, would better serve his purpose. He needed to have evidence, but not too much evidence. He couldn’t let any of his personas seem to know too much.

The time was coming for him to post the video from the warehouse, he thought as he traipsed back through the woods from where he laid his last body, making sure to cover his human-shaped footprints as he went. The time was coming, but it wasn’t quite yet.

*

Not long after he freed Tom McNair, Nick would admonish himself for his own naivety. Never trust dumb luck, he’d think on some level, beneath the searing pain being inflicted on him by the cross Pete had put up on his door. 

He should have gotten rid of the man somehow. He did not regret admitting to the journalist that he was right about vampires; it was clear that he knew enough that denial was a futile tactic. He’d had to think quickly when Pete had come to him full of accusations about the existence of supernatural creatures, full not of fear but of fervor, of anger. If he had been afraid, denying vampires might have been possible. If he had been afraid, he might have taken comfort in being told he was wrong. But Nick could tell right away that Pete, to his credit, was not afraid. He was livid, and angry people did not like being told they were wrong. So Nick tried instead to subtly shift the narrative.

His mistake, he realized as he was trying to determine how he would escape the hotel room, was giving into his curiosity about how much information Pete had. He was not, at first, certain why he had done so, but in time he realized. Pete was like him.

Not exactly, of course. Pete’s agenda was revenge; Nick’s was more practical. But they had similar goals of exposing a very big secret, similar lives dedicated to this cause. It meant that, in some ways, Pete thought like him. Which meant he had taken very good precautions against failure.

It seemed like dire straits Nick found himself in. For a moment. 

It took him a surprisingly short amount of time to recall the story of Hal’s imprisonment in the Hungarian monastery, and how it had ended.

A new thought reached his consciousness beneath the burning as he moved toward Pete; that Hal was looking out for him from beyond the grave. Impossible, and also not as comforting as such superstitions were generally meant to be. But, at least in this instance, he would take whatever help he could get.

As he continued his stilted, nearly impossible path forward, he also thought, simply, Sorry Pete.

In another time I might have admired you.

As was always the case, it was a utilitarian killing. A murder of convenience. A crime scene that’s brutality would cause police to mistake it for passionate when it was nothing of the sort.

Sorry Pete.

He grimaced as the man’s blood ran down his suit, into his hair, onto his face, as he employed his human shield against the holy symbol on the door, wiping off the offending residue as much as he could with the non-bloodstained parts of his sleeves as he exited the hotel, thankful that Pete had set up shop in a quiet part of town. He hurried back to the flat he was renting as quickly and quietly as he could, and he started making the phone calls he needed to make to keep both the public and the other vampires from finding out about this unfortunate detour he had taken.

*

Having been through what Nick felt justified in considering quite an ordeal made him that much more frustrated when Golda showed up.

He was sick of the vampire hierarchy, and each time he had such a thought he did wonder how he could justify what he was doing for the Old Ones, but he reminded himself that he was really only doing it for them in name; he was doing it for himself. To impress them, sure, but so that he could rise, not because he cared about their opinions. And if he cared little what the Old Ones thought, he cared even less for Golda and her bizarre lackeys, one of whom caused Nick to promise to himself that his own interest in cinema would not ever turn him into someone so intolerable.

Apparently, however, fate still felt like being kind to him. Not long after Golda arrived, Tom showed up to his office with another werewolf, Allison, to question him about the source of the video of his transformation, and he realized opportunity had presented itself once again.

It was a risk sending them to the docks on their own, but he had little faith in Golda’s minions, and a great deal of faith in Tom as a vampire hunter. Nick was almost going to be sad to betray him, after all the help he was providing. But, he reminded himself, needs must.

Especially since Golda was planning to use him for something as uninspired as a dogfight. Tom deserved better, really.

Allison might be a problem, but Nick knew he could either work around her or use her to his advantage. They liked him and, far more importantly, they trusted him, which meant as long as he was careful they would not have reason to think he was lying, and they could serve his ends as well as their own right up until the moment those needs conflicted.

He did not expect it all to end the way it did. Allison, while the catalyst for Tom’s involvement in this particular situation, also risked being the ruin of the whole operation. When she came to the warehouse on her own and confronted Golda, Nick began to fear that it would all go less neatly than he had hoped.

It turned out that he needn’t have worried.

Allison was too trusting for her own good; a trait she shared with Tom. Nick would call it unfortunate if it was not working to his advantage. Luckily, he did not share this failing with them. Allison let her guard down after she forced Golda to agree to let them be, and it was a boon to them all that Nick was there and knew not to trust such a promise. When Allison dropped the stake she had brought, Nick seized it at the first opportunity and drove it through Golda’s heart. The grin he wore when he met Tom and Allison’s eyes through the smoke of her remains was entirely genuine.

*

Because Nick needed hands to help him arrange the werewolf attack at the nightclub, he rounded up the few remaining vampires in Barry who, through their own machinations or pure ignorance, had avoided being a part of the drama that had unfolded in the last few months. It was a meager group; there were only four men he could even get interested in helping him. But they would be enough. And he could start his relationship with them from a place of authority.

He spent the night before he gathered his new team for their first meeting trying to come up with something to say to them. He paced his small flat and went over and over different speeches, dismissing some of his ideas almost immediately and lingering over others before he decided they were not right for what he was trying to achieve.

The men would be his men. For the first time he would have his own men, and he needed them to look up to him, to want to follow him, to see him as a leader. He had never had to engender that kind of trust and loyalty in anyone before, and in time he was wringing his hands and rubbing his temples, almost certain that he would not be able to do it.

Then came the voice again.

You know what they need to hear.

Nick scoffed out loud, then hated that he had.

But, he said to this other part of himself, that speech didn’t actually work on me.

Didn’t it? Hal’s voice asked. What is it you’re doing now? Dreams and ambitions too big, too rich for this domestic world. Is that not what you’re chasing?

Was it? Nick wondered. If it wasn’t, then what was his purpose? 

This question made him uncomfortable.

The voice did not say anything else.

*

When he gathered his meager crew before him in the warehouse the next day, the words came easily. If anyone had asked, he would have said he had not thought about them, at least not all of them, all at once, in their original order, in many years. But when he spoke them it was like they fell out of his mouth without him having to think them, like they had just been waiting to be regurgitated, to be reused, to be brought full circle in his voice. It was a strange sensation, and one he likely would have spent some time pondering, if something even stranger hadn’t happened next.

His recitation was interrupted by the slamming of the warehouse door.

Nick was on edge immediately; no one else should have been there, and there was almost no potential scenario where this meeting being discovered boded well for him.

The intruder stepped forward from among the industrial equipment and suddenly his face was visible and it was swimming in Nick’s vision even though he could see everything around it perfectly. It was like seeing it again after so much time required it to be remapped to his brain. Or it was like he couldn’t take it in all at once because the shock might kill him again, so his mind fed details to him in bits and pieces. Or it was like he expected it to be different, so it took time for him to realize that it was, of course, the same as it had always been. Or it was like he had to convince himself he was seeing it again, that he had truly given up hope that this moment would ever come, that the figure before him was and only ever would be a memory, except that now he wasn’t. He was standing fifteen feet from Nick, his hair a little shorter, his clothes a little more casual, but everything else more or less the same as it had been the last time Nick had seen it all in 1955.

“My God,” Nick managed to say at last.

If he registered the disdain in Hal’s voice, if he noticed the way he spat the words, “It’s you,” at him as if there was no one he had less wanted to find in this dingy warehouse by the Welsh seaside, he did not react to it. Nothing Hal said mattered as much in the moment as the fact that he was there, that he was standing before Nick in the flesh, that he was alive. 

Alive. Hal was alive.

This thought began to run through his brain over and over, the dim chorus continuing even as Hal asked what he was doing, and Nick responded in kind. He did not wait for an answer before he gave into the urge he suddenly realized had risen in him to close the distance between them and throw his arms around Hal.

As with the hostile greeting, if some part of Nick was aware of the fact that Hal did not return his embrace, he did not pay it any mind.

It was not until Hal refused to engage with several of his excited proclamations about their reunion that Nick had to acknowledge the disparity.

Hal did not respond when he referenced the long years of their separation, but Nick witnessed a shift in his face that he could not read, which caused him to notice that his first assessment of Hal had been wrong; he had been changed by time. He bore an expression Nick had never seen in the man who recruited him, like he was a stranger wearing Hal’s face. It alarmed him for a moment, but he assured himself that it was fine; it had been a long, long time, and neither of them had expected to see the other, and in time Hal would surely come back to himself.

Nick called for a drink.

He was aware enough of his position as leader of the gathered men that he did not allow himself to react to Hal the way he really wanted to, but he was certainly less in control than he normally would have been. He wrapped one arm tightly around Hal as he turned to introduce him, and rested his other arm on Hal’s own. He almost surprised himself with the words that came spilling out of his mouth as he explained to the group who Hal was; never before had he reveled in the olden days, at least not in the chaos and the destruction that they had wrought. Never had he sounded so much like the other vampires who compared their kills, who leered at people on the street they thought would be good victims, who thrived on their inhumanity.

It was practical, he would tell himself after the fact. These men were vampires, and that was the sort of thing vampires liked to hear. He could not tell them all the reasons he was really glad to see Hal, all the things they had got up to that were not murder, all the things he really longed to have back in his life. That was, surely, why he said the things he said. 

By the time he gave this any thought, he had been presented with so many confusing details that he had no idea if he believed it or not.

His analysis of his own intentions was further muddied by Hal’s, at best, lukewarm reaction to his praise. That was a long time ago, he said, as if fifty-five years was anything to the man who’d been alive now for almost six hundred. This is all backwards, Nick would later remember thinking, whether it had actually occurred in the moment or not. It should have felt a lifetime to him, for whom it had been more than half of his time on Earth, but he was not lying when he said it felt like yesterday. Another explanation quite suddenly came to him for why it took so long for him to really take Hal in when he entered; it was like he had been waking up. Like perhaps the last fifty-five years hadn’t really happened at all, had been a dream, and now his life could really start again because he was conscious, awake, alive.

Like Hal had brought a part of him back.

“To us,” Nick said as he raised two glasses between them, and then, “to you,” because he was not foolish enough to assume Hal did not still want his customary amount of respect.

But Hal did not seem at all concerned with how he was spoken to. He was staring at the blood with a panicked expression on his face, his jaw tight and his eyes wide. He did not respond to Nick’s prodding to take the glass. When he finally looked up he was sweating.

Nick began to panic as well when Hal suggested he was going to leave. He had to stop himself from tossing aside the glasses and running to bar the door or grabbing onto Hal as if he were strong enough to keep him there against his will. 

“I’ll be back,” Hal said, but it was small comfort.

“I promise,” he said the second time, and Nick could not have said whether a promise from Hal Yorke actually carried that much weight for him or if he just needed anything to latch onto to convince himself the past would not be repeated. 

Nick watched Hal stumble out of the room, breaking into a run as he turned the corner toward the door, and realized that something was terribly wrong.

*

Nick tried for the rest of the morning to set aside his swirling emotions with, at best, minimal success. He needed to focus; Tom was coming to his office and Nick needed to get him on board for the next stage of the plan, the one where his work would really start making the headlines. But while he waited for Tom to arrive he could not help staring into space with his mind fully occupied by things he had refused to give his full attention for a very long time.

Hal would come back, he kept telling himself. He had promised. He would come back and Nick would figure out what had happened to him, why he was behaving this way, why he was here.

Why he had left.

It was impossible for Nick not to think about the fact that Hal’s being alive in the here and now meant it was beyond doubt that in 1955 he had chosen to leave. For some reason he had walked away from everything he’d spent years acquiring, all the respect he’d almost given his life to earn. He’d walked away from the people who counted on his leadership, who needed him as liaison with the human element of their city.

He’d walked away from Nick.

All by choice.

Nick was suddenly quite violently assaulted by a memory so vivid he felt like he had been pulled from time and inserted back into the moment. Back to a moment when he still could not kill, when he still lived in fear, when he still thought his life might end up some other way than it had. He was covered in dirt by the side of the road in 1950 and Hal was looming over him, his expression so sure, poised, calculated; so unlike his expression that morning in the warehouse. He was staring down at Nick and then he was speaking in a low voice, a chilling voice, a voice that even that early on Nick knew and feared, and he was saying:

All we require is everything.

If there had ever been any comfort in the phrase, if it had ever been anything other than a threat, other than an intimidation, if Nick had ever achieved any degree of peace by recalling it, it was because he assumed it applied to all of them. He assumed it applied to Hal.

You are here forever, was what it said, but so am I. Nick remembered well enough that he had gone on a journey that turned that statement from a threat to a promise. This is forever, Hal had said, and eventually Nick had decided he was okay with that, because he thought it meant forever for all of it; he thought it meant forever for Hal.

He could not believe that anymore.

I’ll ask him, Nick thought, back suddenly in his office in 2010. I’ll ask him why he went and maybe he will have a good answer, and maybe it will all still make sense. And when he’s his old self, I’ll tell him what I’m doing, and he’ll be proud, and he’ll come back, and everything will be the way it should’ve always been.

Certainly it would all happen this way.

Nick was interrupted by a knock on the door which he jumped up to answer, because he knew it would be Tom. 

He hoped the man would not notice how on edge he was.

When Tom pulled out notecards and began to recite his reasons for pulling out of helping with the Old Ones, Nick had to work very hard not to lash out. He wasn’t even sure he would have been lashing out at Tom; he really had no ill will toward him. He wouldn’t be doing what he was doing if there was another way, he told himself. He was not cruel.

Needs must.

He made the desperate, hopeless play of pulling out the history-maker speech; hopeless because he knew it would not work on Tom. He would have used it before if he thought it would. As he knew would happen, Tom ignored him, and went on with his very ironic assertion that Nick had been a part of teaching him that some vampires could be good.

Oh Tom, he could not help thinking, you really met me at the wrong time.

Tom continued his stilted speech, and Nick cringed to hear himself fumble madly to get Tom back onside, and when he finally raised his voice he knew, at least on some level, that he was as angry at himself as he was at Tom.

“There are people who need to see me do this!” he shouted, and he was not even a little bit convinced that he was talking about the Old Ones.

Nick’s outburst at least served the purpose of quieting Tom long enough for him to regain his composure.

Tom would not be convinced with the promise of glory or acclaim, and Nick had known that. But, he realized as he decided to invite him to dinner, he might be convinced that there were people he needed to prove himself to.

After Tom agreed to the meal and left, Nick realized his hands were shaking, and he forcefully grabbed one in the other and tried to make them stop. He told himself that it was fine, that he’d pulled the situation out of the hole, and that he would surely succeed at getting Tom back in now that he remembered which buttons to push, which nerves to touch.

He continued for some time with these efforts to reassure himself that he was competent and in a clear state of mind, but he could not stop the shaking.

*

Nick went back to the warehouse to wait for Hal. He did not want to look like he was waiting, but he couldn’t not be waiting, so he did his best to look disinterested in what he was waiting for. 

He spent a great deal of time trying to plan what he would say, attempting to come up with a good line to get a conversation started when Hal arrived. He decided after some time that it would be best to start with a truth.

When Hal ascended the steps to the balcony where Nick sat, his face was pinched in a tense expression, and Nick was struck again by how different he looked from the man he remembered. In the old days, his control almost always seemed effortless. Now it looked like he was hanging on by his fingernails.

“Funny thing is,” Nick said, hoping it came across as casually as he wanted it to, “I’ve been thinking about you recently. Maybe that’s why I buried the coroner there.”

“As a message for me?” Hal said, and Nick tried not to reveal that he was shocked by the suggestion, by the implication that Hal thought Nick might have known he was alive.

“No, nothing like that,” he said, “I really did think you were proper dead.”

He let this hang between them for a short moment.

“No, more of an homage because of what I’m doing I guess,” he said, and when Hal immediately questioned his plans Nick smiled.

“You’re very curious. That’s new.”

“Perhaps I can help,” Hal offered, and Nick did not have to know him as well as he did to know the offer was insincere.

He rose to face him and decided finally to ask what he really wanted to.

“Why did you go?” he said, and in Hal’s pause added, in case the man had any heartstrings to pull, “I deserve to know that much.”

“I wanted something different,” Hal said, and Nick did not know if there was any answer that would have been good enough for him, but that one certainly wasn’t.

“You couldn’t talk to me about it?” he prodded.

“No,” Hal said, his voice smaller than Nick had known it could be. “You were part of it.”

Nick felt his anger rising. He felt like he was back in the early fifties, having one of the first real conversations he ever had with Hal, the kind where he didn’t realize what he had to say until he was saying it and surprising them both with the feelings that had been lurking beneath the surface.

“You marooned me in a different world,” he said, the truth of it breaking to him as he broke it to Hal. “Talk about burning my bridges…”

He wished Hal’s pained expression could feel gratifying.

When Hal said, “Yeah,” Nick felt like he was approaching his boiling point.

Was that all? He asked Hal, and Hal offered nothing else, even when Nick spat the useless word back in his face.

Nick waited a little longer before rubbing his hands over his face and moving to the other side of the table.

He was not sure what he was waiting for. Before their meeting, he would have said it was having the old Hal back. Now, his anger still simmering below the surface, he wondered if he wouldn’t be happier with something entirely unknown.

But not this. He was certain he did not want this.

Whatever it was he did want, he could not keep pursuing it now without losing his temper, and he refused to let that happen. So he shifted the conversation to why Hal had come to Barry.

He was again disappointed. When Hal expressed confusion about the question, Nick believed that he really did not understand the little town’s significance. Some twist of fate had brought him to the current hub of vampiric activity; he had not sought it out. 

But. He had sought out answers. And he had come back for them when he did not get them the first time.

Hal asked when the Old Ones would arrive, and Nick could not resist inserting a well-worn jab about Hal’s own status. 

“Soon, I guess,” he answered, “No one knows, you’re a circumspect bunch.”

Hal did not react. 

Nick was tired of this stoicism.

He intentionally kept his discussion of his plan vague, hoping to keep Hal hooked without actually revealing much of anything. When Hal pressed, he pretended to tease about him running away again, as if it were not quite suddenly his biggest fear.

“I’m here now,” Hal said, his tone more emphatic than it had been since he entered the building.

Nick looked him up and down once before he spoke again.

“In body, yeah.”

Nick picked up the pitcher he’d set out on the table poured a glass. He watched Hal watching him.

“What do you say?” he asked as he presented the drink to Hal. “Old times?”

“And then you’ll tell me?” Hal asked, and Nick knew he’d won.

“And then I’ll tell you,” he promised.

He watched Hal reach for the glass. He watched his hand shake as he raised it to his mouth. He almost laughed at the half-hearted tip of the cup Hal extended his way; he would’ve laughed, if he hadn’t felt like the situation had very high stakes. If the irony of seeing Hal in this position wasn’t as painful as it was amusing. If he did not feel like his future was riding on whether Hal accepted what he was offering. 

He was not sure until the last second if Hal was actually going to drink it.

*

After the blood, Hal was all but incoherent. Nick gave him directions to the nightclub he planned to bring Tom to and told him when to be there the next day, but he guessed there was only a thirty percent chance of Hal having both heard and understood him.

When Hal left, he told the two of his men he believed were the most likely to be discreet to follow him.

He was both intrigued and concerned by Hal’s behavior, but he tried to set it aside for the evening. If all went well, Hal would show up tomorrow to witness Nick’s achievement, and he had to go to dinner to make sure he would be achieving anything at all.

It was not hard, logistically, to manipulate Tom. Easy enough, in fact, that Nick told himself its simplicity was what kept it from being satisfying. He walked away from their meal so certain that Tom was going to come back around that he was not at all surprised a short time later when he got a phone call. He had played every card right.

He tried very hard to feel triumph.

It was easier to focus on the positive once his men told him where Hal had gone after he left the warehouse, and who they had managed to bring back with them.

He hadn’t even told them to do that. Maybe he was an inspiring leader after all.

The girl was loud and strong and very, very angry. Nick knew she would not actually be reassured by his promise that she was better off dying now than living to see what he was bringing about, but he told her so anyway. Then he kept her alive overnight so that when Hal arrived the next day the blood could be fresh.

He had decided what he was going to do with her without even giving it any thought.

His men offered to do the work, but Nick told them, just this once, he would do it himself.

He knew why, but he also did not know why. He pondered it as he worked down in the basement to recreate the scene of Rachel’s death. Because Hal had done it to him, that was obvious. Because he wanted Hal back. That was obvious as well. Where he started to stumble over his motivations was when he tried to piece together why that led him back to Rachel’s death.

Had it started him down the path he was on now? Probably it had. But had it done so in the way Hal claimed he intended? That was fuzzier. It had cut his biggest ties to his old life, which had certainly been one of Hal’s intentions. But the part where he’d unwittingly drunk her blood, the part that was supposed to make him feel inhuman, make him aware of how far he’d really been dragged from her; that had not, he believed, had the desired effect. It hadn’t made him want to embrace that inhumanity any more than he had before. If anything, it had made him more scared, had made him less open, had added to his very human experience of grief. 

But then, he supposed, that had all served Hal’s needs too, in the end.

By the time he had strung up the girl, Alex, he thought she had said, and begun feeding her blood into plastic jugs on the floor, he decided that his motivations for killing her mattered as little as whether or why this tactic had been effective on him in the past. It was Hal’s idea, so Hal would understand it, and that was all he needed for it to work. 

When one of the jugs was full he brought it up the stairs and filled his crystal decanter. He brought a small table from the bar area out onto the dance floor and set the decanter and two glasses on top of it. The scene staged, Nick leaned against the table and tried to plan what he was going to say.

*

When Hal entered the club he looked more terrified than Nick had ever imagined he could, which was to say, he looked terrified, and Nick had not known that was possible.

Nick asked him how long it had been since he drank blood. He stopped in the middle of pouring when he heard the answer.

Fifty-five years.

Nick did not need to be told when the last time had been.

He remembered, and tried not to react to remembering, the day he had discovered Hal missing. How he’d found the werewolf missing too. How he’d searched all over Cardiff. How even after he’d done these things he refused to believe it, how he had, for all of those fifty-five years, refused to acknowledge the one explanation for Hal’s disappearance that turned out to be the truth.

It was with a great effort that he forced himself not to spiral down the hole where this line of thinking would lead him. To ignore the chambers of memory as they floated past. 

Hal refused his offer of a fresh glass. Nick let it drop.

He tried to lighten the mood with a _Gorillas in the Mist_ reference, but apparently Hal’s half-century as part of the human world had not gotten him up to date on pop culture.

It took more cajoling, but Hal finally downed the glass with the same pained expression he had worn the previous day, and Nick had the passing thought that this was probably what he had looked like back when Hal first made him drink.

Hal did not, of course, suspect anything about the blood.

Nick could not help chuckling.

It was time, finally, for him to unveil his machinations to Hal. He felt rather queasy as he realized it.

He admitted his nerves out loud, but then he steeled himself.

He could do this. He would do this.

As he began to speak, he remembered why he’d come up with this plan, and why he believed in it; like Hal, the rest of the Old Ones did not understand humanity. They’d been apart from it for so long that they thought themselves above it by nature. Nick explained to Hal what he knew that the others had forgotten; humanity was stubborn and resourceful, and to overcome them would require not force but deceit.

Apparently Hal was recovered enough from his reintroduction to blood that he was getting the idea, because when Nick asked his half-rhetorical question about how to make humans welcome them, Hal answered.

“You show them something worse.”

Nick waited for him to finish connecting the dots.

“Werewolves,” he said, and Nick remembered vividly the day in Hal’s study all those years ago that he had said that same word in a similar tone of heavy realization.

Nick filled in the rest of the details and waited for Hal’s horrified expression to change. It did not.

He moved back to the table and leaned in close to Hal.

“This is where the others got it wrong,” he said. “You try to take the world by force and humanity will fight you on every street corner. But frighten them- they’ll line up, loosen their collars, and bare their veins.”

As he finished the thought, he had, for the first time since he had conceived his plan, an inkling of why it had all felt so obvious to him. He immediately doused the flame that had sparked. He had no time for all the reflection that kept threatening to overwhelm him, and he knew from experience that even if he indulged it, it would do him no good.

Instead, he made a last attempt to get Hal back before he had to dredge up more of the past.

“I’m not just doing this for the Old Ones,” he said. “I’m doing it for you. I wanted to make you proud.”

He paused as panic crept into Hal’s face. He searched for the words that would turn this situation the way he needed it to turn.

“Be a history-maker,” he added. 

That did get Hal’s attention.

“This is insane,” he stammered.

“I knew you’d be like this,” Nick said, not acknowledging that he’d hoped it would be overcome more easily.

“As soon as you came back I could smell that mercy on you like cigarette smoke. Look Hal, it happens. Christ, it happened to me! Luckily, you were there to help me through it. And now I’m going to return the favor.”

It could no longer be avoided. He began to lead Hal down to the cellar.

When Hal saw Alex he fell to his knees. And just as Hal’s men had done to Nick, Nick’s men raised Hal back to standing. Nick wanted it to feel better than it did.

“I knew something was wrong when you freaked out over the blood, so I had you followed,” he said. “And there you were breaking bread with a human. How did her blood taste?”

Hal said nothing.

“I know what it’s like,” Nick continued, raising a hand to rest it on Hal’s shoulder. “They get under your skin. But I don’t want you to thank me.”

He had no idea if that last sentence was entirely sincere or entirely sarcastic or somewhere in the middle. He thought it hadn’t mattered why he did this, or what he thought of it, but now, in the moment, he felt almost panicked. He was hiding it from Hal, because he was good at hiding those things, had been required to become good at hiding those things, but there was a small voice in his brain that had recently been drowned out by the Hal-voice, but now was getting louder every second and yelling at him that this all felt wrong.

“No,” Nick pressed on, “we’re even now, and we can watch dawn break over the new world together.”

That was probably the closest he’d come all night to saying what he really felt.

He hadn’t meant to say it like that- we’re even, like he did this for revenge, like he knew it was only senseless cruelty that he had committed, like he had never believed it could be anything else. That wasn’t what he had meant, that wasn’t what this had been about, that wasn’t the kind of thing he did.

His panic was interrupted by Hal asking him the name of the werewolf he had chosen.

When he told him and Hal’s grimace intensified, Nick was not entirely sure why but there was no possible explanation that he liked even a little bit.

“This is why you coming back is so perfect,” he continued, doing his best to ignore the still-rising tide of anxiety. “This is the end of the journey that you started me on.”

He no longer questioned whether part of him meant this last as an accusation.

“Don’t do this,” Hal said, “please,” and Nick had not thought the man could bring him any more unpleasant surprises, but apparently he had never actually, at any point in his life, known anything about Hal Yorke.

“Sorry,” Nick said, stepping back gingerly, “what?”

“I’ll do anything,” Hal said, and the sickening shocks continued as he knelt and grabbed Nick’s hand. “Just stop this.”

“What are you doing?” Nick asked, unable to keep his voice from shaking now. “Oh god, are you begging?” He stepped away from Hal’s touch as if it burned him. “Now you stop, seriously, it’s horrid.”

“Please,” Hal said again, his eyes pleading as intensely as his voice.

“Cutler,” he said softly, and then,

“Nick.”

Nick burst out laughing. It was not funny, not even a little bit. It was perhaps the most unfunny situation he had ever been in, and he was counting every bit of the past sixty years in that estimation.

“Now he’s callin’ me Nick,” he scoffed to no one in particular. The other men in the room had no idea what this display was all about, and he was not ever going to explain it to them. 

“You can’t do this!” he shouted, but he was out of persuasion, out of Hal’s own tactics to turn against him. He was left with only an assertion that sounded petulant even to his own ears.

“You’re Hal Yorke!” he cried, then turned away again.

“I’m gonna heave,” he said, and he felt like he meant it.

Then Hal’s voice came again, and Nick thought nothing could have angered him more than that utterance of his first name, that effort to appeal to a person that Hal himself had spent five years trying to destroy, but if he could have even formulated the sentence Hal spoke next he would have known it was the ultimate insult Hal could deliver him.

“Remember what you were.”

Nick looked up at him again. He did not laugh. He did not smile. He stared for a moment before moving swiftly to the spot where Hal was still kneeling and hoisting him by his lapels.

“WHAT I WAS?” he screamed, “NO, YOU STOLE THAT FROM ME! You dragged me into this world! You killed my wife! You turned me into a murderer an addict! You made me abandon my whole species!”

While Nick yelled, Hal did nothing.

He barely reacted. The closest Nick had ever seen him look to the way he looked in that moment was on the night before he left, the night before he abandoned Nick, when Nick for the first time in his life thought it was possible for Hal to be hurt.

“I know,” he said quietly when Nick paused, “and there aren’t words to tell you how sorry I  
am-”

“No!” Nick shouted, unable to bear the thought of that hollow sentence going one word further. “No you do not do that and then apologize! No sir!”

“I can’t let this happen, Cutler,” Hal said, and Nick almost laughed again at the return to his surname. “I will kill you if I have to, but I will not let you take their world. We don’t deserve it.”

We. 

Nick remembered when Hal including him in that pronoun made him feel special. When it meant he had been given something he craved. Now, it felt much less like a gift and far more like a damning accusation.

Nick stared again. He released Hal and stood up straight. He looked from Hal to the innocent woman he’d mutilated, and then back to Hal, who had a hopeful look on his face.

“Fair enough,” Nick said, hoping that his hesitation gave Hal even a hint of the false security that had been extended to him repeatedly over the years. He nodded at his men to leave, then moved to block Hal from the door.

“But you’ll have to get out of here first,” he said, then slammed the door in Hal’s face.

*

Nick’s men had secured a police van for him to use to pick Tom up; apparently they were determined to surprise him with their competence. He thanked them and set off for the B&B alone.

On the way he tried and failed not to think.

He had believed that he would pull Hal back. If he hadn’t been certain about anything else, including his own desire to succeed, he had been certain about that.

But Hal had not come.

He should have killed him, he realized belatedly, but it was a ridiculous thought. He never would.

He would not leave him trapped in the cellar either; he already knew that later, when his appointment with Tom was over, he would let him out, and then- then what?

No path was going to unfold in front of him. He understood this intuitively. Hal’s personality was a constant that had been toppled, and he had no idea how to proceed.

Stick to the plan, he told himself. It’s all you can do now.

But he was hardly thinking about the plan. He definitely wasn’t thinking about what would come after. He was reliving those moments in the cellar over and over, with vivid color and crisp sound. He kept hearing Hal say those things he never should have been able to conceive of, the words of another man coming out in the voice of one he thought he’d known so much about. 

If he’d had a grip on anything lately, Nick was losing it.

He was relieved when he pulled up at Tom’s.

Tom bantered playfully about Nick bringing the police van in case he changed his mind, which reassured Nick that he would cooperate all the way to the club. His spirits were lifted somewhat by the prospect of his success.

Then he heard the baby cry.

“Do you have a baby in there?” he asked

“Yeah, George and Nina’s,” Tom replied.

Nick stared.

“The War Child?”

Tom scoffed.

“I thought Regus killed her,” Nick said, and in the back of his mind wondered how many times in a day he could be violently thrown for a loop before he sustained some sort of permanent damage.

“He slipped her to Annie during the kerfuffle,” Tom explained, and Nick glanced back up at the window where he’d heard the crying come from. 

His plan was a good one, and prophecies were a load of rubbish. But he suspected the Old Ones wouldn’t think so. And he was here, at the house where the very much alive baby was, in prime position for a change of plan.

“No,” he said, realizing too late that he was speaking out loud, “We do this, we stick with this.”

He painted on his smile and looked back up at Tom.

“Let’s go save the world!”

Tom smiled, and Nick wished it could all be over faster.

*

It was a relief that lying to Tom still came easily. He didn’t even feel like he was coming across as nervous, and he was impressed with himself for it until thinking about it broke his concentration and he was swept with a wave of such intense anxiety that he had to lean forward on his knees and breathe heavily, prompting an awkward pat on his back from Tom.

He tried once again to sell Tom on the idea of being a history maker. He did not know why he did so. 

He was in no state to be undertaking such an important part of his plan. But it could not wait.

Once he was resigned to the necessity of carrying out the evening as intended, he realized what he really ought to say.

“You’re going to make your dad so proud,” he said, “and take it from me, there should be no better feeling than that.”

The realization that he was not remotely sure what he meant by that last statement made him uncomfortable again, and he was glad when Tom entered the room without saying another word.

Nick retreated to the upper level of the club to wait for the full moon. He had not been so nervous about a full moon for a very long time, he thought, and then wished he had not. 

He wondered how Hal was spending his imprisonment in the cellar. A part of him, perhaps a foolish part, was still hoping that he would come around; that he would bear witness to Nick’s triumph and remember how much he had loved being who he was. Who they were. 

When the club began to fill up, Nick glanced at his watch.

Ten minutes to full moon.

He watched the mostly very young people dancing on the floor below, and he ignored that persistent voice that had been asking him for weeks if he wanted to go through with this.

Most of them would live. Probably. And given what was to come, the ones who wouldn’t might be the lucky ones.

The building was packed now. Nick glanced at his watch again.

Five minutes to.

If he didn’t do this, he reminded himself, there would be more massacres than this. The vampires’ tactics might not ultimately work, but their rampage would be bloody and terrible before they were stopped. And humanity would suffer for nothing. He could not prevent this, so he was easing the transition. It was the best option for everyone; it really was.

He could not keep looking at the people who were about to die. He checked his watch again.

Full moon.

Suddenly he recognized a voice from below.

Somehow Hal had escaped, and he was shouting at the patrons to get out.

This was not of great concern to Nick; they would not listen, and even if they tried to start running now, not all of them would make it.

But Hal had gotten out. And he hadn’t changed his mind.

Nick watched Hal shove the DJ aside and repeat his pleading for people to leave over the microphone. He was ignored again.

Then he was interrupted by a howl.

“Do it now!” Nick shouted to his man at the door of the closet where Tom was transforming. How much of why he did it with such urgency was because of Hal’s intervention and how much was because he feared he would lose his own nerve was not something he could or wanted to determine.

The man listened. Nick heard growling getting louder and louder down the corridor below.

The club-goers had mostly stopped dancing and were now staring at the door from which Tom would soon emerge. They were concerned, but they were not leaving.

When the wolf burst into the room it stood for a moment before them, not moving, not making a sound, just watching. The patrons mirrored it. Many began pulling out their phones.

Good, Nick thought as he saw this happen, make sure you get some clear shots.

The tension was broken by Hal yelling again for the people to run.

This time they listened.

Too late Hal, Nick thought. They’ve done what I needed them to.

The wolf moved to follow the fleeing crowd, but it did so slowly. Before it could catch up to them, Hal stepped off the DJ stand and placed himself in front of it.

Nick’s anxiety mounted. 

This would solve a problem, he told himself of the now very real possibility that Hal was about to be killed. This would be no loss for me. I should have done it myself.

He held his breath while Hal and the wolf stared each other down and knew that despite what he was telling himself, he didn’t want Hal to lose any more than he had wanted it the last time he watched the man face a werewolf.

And I haven’t even given him a bat, Nick thought giddily.

As if hearing the thought, Hal turned and looked up at Nick.

Their eyes held for a moment.

Nick ran.

He would not try to stop it, he decided as he descended the steps from the upper level, but he could not watch it happen. He did not deny to himself that this time it was cowardice that made him flee.

He sprinted out of the building and to his car waiting down the block, but paused before he turned it on. He watched the crowd milling outside the building for several moments before he decided that, having made the choice to do nothing, it would be worse to know than not to.

He was used to living with uncertainty about Hal’s fate, after all.

He turned on the car and sped away. 

*

Nick still had no idea what time the Old Ones would actually arrive, so he went back to his flat and tried to prepare as best as he could. His distraction made this quite difficult.

He left Hal to die.

No, no, he quickly stopped himself, he had not left Hal to die. Hal might not be dead. He had left without helping him.

Was that better?

Hal was trying to ruin everything, he reminded himself, and so Nick did what he had to. It was unfortunate- very unfortunate, perhaps- but it was what had to happen.

Was it?

He paced his living room while this argument raged on in his mind, every heated exchange between different parts of his psyche always ending in the same question that he was not able to, or did not want to, answer: why had he done that?

The first time this question conjured up an image of a face from long ago, Nick did not understand why.

It was the face of the werewolf Hal had fought when Huntington tried to upend his operation. Neil was his name, Nick recalled, and marveled at the fact that he remembered it. Why was picturing Hal down there on the floor of the nightclub standing up to a werewolf making him think of Neil?

It was not just that he was thinking of Neil, either. He was thinking of a very particular moment that he could not believe he recalled so vividly, but there it was, readily available for him to conjure up and ponder. The very first time he’d seen Neil’s face, when Neil had looked to him for help, and he had offered him none.

There was nothing to be done, that’s what he had told himself at the time. He could not help the man and would kill them both trying. That was what he’d thought as he looked away from a condemned man without offering him any hope. And he was thinking about it because he had just done the same thing.

Only this time the condemned man was Hal.

He had weighed Hal’s life in his hands and decided he would not risk himself or his plans for it.

This was almost inconceivable, even though Nick had, obviously, conceived of it. But once he had, he was not surprised he had had to mull it over for so long. Trapping Hal in the cellar had been one thing; it had been a holding action, not a permanent decision. He had not, in fact, made any permanent decision about Hal until the moment he left him alone in the nightclub.

A decision to, Nick had to admit to himself, most likely leave him for dead.

Nick sat down hard on his sofa. His head was spinning. He felt like he might be ill.

He rested his elbows on his knees and put his face in his hands.

How, he wondered, had it just been yesterday morning that Hal reentered his life?

He felt like the last two days had been as lengthy as the fifty-five years that preceded them. 

He had been doing all of this for Hal. He told Hal so just that evening, and he had meant it. And a few hours later he had left Hal to die.

It wasn’t so simple as that, of course. The things Hal had said to him in the cellar, the things that had made him lock him up down there to be dealt with later, those things had altered the equation.

But you had choices, he told himself, you had other ways you could have dealt with it. You had other options. You didn’t take them.

Why hadn’t he done something different?

Nick was hit quite suddenly and violently with an image that was sharply, painfully familiar.

He had been falling since the moment he gave himself up to Hal back in 1951, falling too fast to be reached by the ghostly things that emerged from the misty woods he’d left behind on the ledge in his mind from which he’d jumped. They weren’t memories, he finally understood, the things that hid in the fog. It was memories that pursued him down the shaft he’d been falling through, and he had been able to live with that, because what he’d been running from when he took that leap all those years ago was something worse.

It was the final answer to all the questions he had long since decided were unanswerable. It was the sum total of everything he’d experienced and the understanding of what it meant. It was the ability to see himself clearly, the only mirror that could still capture his reflection, and when he jumped he did so because he hoped he could go on forever without ever being made to look himself in the face.

But suddenly the ledge was back.

He almost felt a physical impact, as if he really had spent decades soaring through an abyss only to find that it was not that, that it was part of a loop that fed him right back to where he started, only with even fewer options that he had before, because now he knew that even if he jumped into the ravine he would, eventually, return.

The darkness and the fall had been what got him through; he had managed the last half-century by staying in perpetual motion and telling himself the end never had to come, that the journey could last forever. In his understanding, this was what Hal had promised.

He shouldn’t have believed it.

When Hal had shown up again, when he had been different, when he made it clear that he hated what he used to be, what Nick was, the illusion was shattered. The inescapability of Nick’s fate became painfully clear. 

He remembered Hal trying to apologize. He laughed bitterly. 

Hal didn’t even know what he should really have been apologizing for. If Hal had understood anything about Nick, about what he’d done to Nick, about how he had brought about the situation they were in, he wouldn’t have expressed his regret about turning Nick into a vampire. He would have said he was sorry for making Nick believe that might be okay.

*

At some point, Nick must have fallen asleep. When he woke up it was mid-morning, and he jumped up from the couch where he’d spent the night and rushed to get dressed and go to the warehouse. He did not know why he felt certain he was late.

He wasn’t entirely sure why he was still going, except that it was the only thing he could think of to do. If there was nothing else for him; certainly no human life, and now no kind of afterlife that he had ever imagined wanting; he might as well stick to the plan. That was what he had been doing as each blow was dealt to him over the past several months. 

He steeled himself, then walked into the warehouse.

The Old Ones were seated at a long banquet table in a scene that reminded him of Da Vinci’s Last Supper, and he had a laugh to himself about that loaded comparison. 

The man in the middle would have been the obvious leader even if he had not been front and center. Nick tried not to stare at him.

He was very tall and paler than Nick knew a person could be. His veins bulged under his skin and where his body wasn’t sheet-white it was yellow, like the dirty beds of his fingernails. He moved slowly when Nick entered, and Nick had the impression he did not move quickly under any circumstances.

Nick remembered someone mentioning a Mr. Snow and knew that this man could be no one else.

He looked up in his own time and spoke.

“And you are?”

“Cutler,” Nick said, trying to swallow his nervous inflection, “Nick Cutler.”

“There was no one here to greet us, Cutler Nick Cutler,” Snow said. His voice felt like it was scraping against Nick’s brain.

“We weren’t sure when you were arriving,” Nick explained. “It’s been-” he paused. “I’m all that’s left,” he decided to say, “everyone else ran away or got proper dead.”

“How?”

“Werewolves,” Nick answered, “We had a bit of an infestation.”

The pale man turned to a figure who appeared to be some sort of bodyguard and said in a playful tone, “Did you hear that Milo? Your brothers have been causing a rumpus.”

At these words Nick got a good look at the other man, as well as a whiff of his blood, and realized that he was, despite all sense, a werewolf. A werewolf protecting the most elite vampires in the world. 

Nick wondered when the surprises would cease.

His eyes were drawn back to Snow when he began to speak again.

“So,” he said, “you’re the last man standing.”

He looked Nick up and down while he twirled a grape between his fingers. He gave the impression that anything that what was happening was at best a passing amusement for him.

“A tribute must be paid nonetheless,” he said finally.

Nick waited to see if he would say more.

“I last came to Britain in 1779,” Snow related. “My people took me to a village where they killed all the adults and used the bodies to create a tableau of scenes from our history. The children sang to me, and then we made wine from their blood.”

Nick thought that perhaps he’d been lucky to have Hal as his creator after all.

“I was so touched,” the man said, and, as he popped the last of a grape into his mouth, asked, “What do you have for me, Cutler Nick Cutler?”

Nick took a deep breath.

“Only the world,” he said.

“I was planning to just take the world,” the man said, “I didn’t realize I needed you to give it to me.”

Before that moment, Nick had not hated the man. He had feared him, and he had been confused by him, and he had even disliked him. But he had not hated him. Quite suddenly he did, and very intensely. The arrogant bastard thought he could do anything he wanted, just like all the rest. Whatever made him special, it apparently did not make him any better than any other vampire Nick had ever encountered at understanding the human world. It just made him infinitely more irritating in his ignorance.

Nick did not, of course, express this. Once his plan worked, they would all realize how foolish they’d been.

“Well,” he said, “something to ease the transition then.”

The man gestured impatiently for him to continue.

“Okay,” Nick said, and he began to explain.

As he laid out the key points, no one looked particularly impressed. This did not bother him; he had expected it. When he felt the time was right, he moved to pull the television into the room.

“I present you,” he said as he wheeled the screen before them, “with something worse.”

“Worse than me?” the man said.

“Well, not worse, of course,” he amended, “but something… less elegant, perhaps. Werewolves.”

The guard, Milo, snapped at him.  
“What was that you little fuck?”

Nick said nothing. It was clear this werewolf had some status among the Old Ones despite being an inferior in their eyes, and he did not want to cross them, assuming he had not somehow done so already. He ignored the jab and continued.

“Last night, humanity saw the beginning of the end of its reign. Welcome to Britain, Mr. Snow. The revolution is being televised.”

He pressed the power button.

He cursed inwardly at whoever had switched off of a news channel. The reveal was going to be more anticlimactic than he had hoped.

But as he began to flip through the channels, news and otherwise, he found nothing being reported at all.

He tried to ignore the jabs Mr. Snow was making behind him, but he was not very successful.

“They must be suppressing it somehow,” he said as he turned off the offensive TV. “There were witnesses.”

“Witnesses to what?” Milo asked.

“I had a werewolf,” he explained, “I let him loose in a nightclub. I saw them filming him. If the world would have found out about them, they would have been terrified. They would want us to save them.”

“Thanks to you,” Mr. Snow said, “breweries the world over are safe from piss-ups.”

Nick lost control of his anger. He ran at Mr. Snow, prepared to defend his plan, but Milo stopped him with one strong arm and a vial of red liquid next to his face.

“My own blood,” the werewolf explained. “It’ll sting.”

“A tribute must still be paid, Cutler Nick Cutler,” Mr. Snow said behind him, and Nick had to stop himself from offering the tribute of a stake through the heart.

“It’s a question of protocol,” Snow continued, “or there will be consequences.”

“The War Child,” he said, “the human savior, the child from the myth. She is here. I know where they’re hiding her, I could go there and I could kill her for you.”

“No one touches that child,” Snow said. It was the first statement he’d made that sounded like it had any fire behind it.

Milo let go of him, and Nick turned to face Snow again.

“But the skin parchments say she’ll destroy vampires,” Nick said. Mr. Snow said nothing. He reached for something that a woman a few seats down from him had pulled out of her bag. She unfolded it, and Nick saw what it was.

“That’s the final piece,” he said.

“Death of the Godhead,” Mr. Snow said, pointing to the parchment, “humanity lives.”

“What?” Nick said.

“To save humanity,” Snow said, “she must be killed. And therefore she must live.”

“But we didn’t know,” Nick said, feeling now quite helpless and wondering why in the world the pieces of the prophecy were kept secret from people who might have needed to know about them. From even that idiot, that vampire recorder, who supposedly kept their history. It was just like them, he thought ruefully, to be so needlessly secretive. To get in their own way at every turn.

Snow walked slowly around the table and took a glass of blood that was offered him by another Old One whose body was that of a young girl. Nick shuddered. Snow turned toward him and began to speak again.

“These eyes have looked upon pharaohs and the son of a carpenter,” he said, and Nick wanted to tell him they could look upon his fist, but he managed again to resist. 

“And now,” Snow continued, “they must look at you, proudly showing me your idea like a child with a handful of its own excrement.”

He paused and moved far closer to Nick than Nick was comfortable with.

“I have never known humiliation, failure, or obscurity,” he said. “How does it make you feel?”

Nick said nothing.

Snow smiled. “Like coming home, I imagine,” he said as he rubbed his ancient, dirty, ashen hand down Nick’s face.

“I’ve already forgotten your name,” Snow said as he turned away.

“My name’s Cutler,” Nick shouted at his back, aware that Milo would stop him running forward again but trying it nonetheless. 

“I’ll make sure you remember that!” he shouted as he was dragged from the room. “You’re nothing but a relic! I’ll make sure you remember my name!”

*

Nick was fuming as he was thrown from the building, and he was glad of it. Anger was probably the most useful emotion he could access.

His last hope had been to prove himself to the Old Ones, and now even that door was closed to him.

Last hope of what? He asked himself, and he could not give a good answer.

Last hope of a future, he supposed, although what sort of future it would be was most likely one of those things in the mist that he was trying very hard not to become aware of.

He walked down the docks away from the warehouse, but he had no destination in mind. Where was there left that was worth going? He could think of nowhere he wanted to be, nothing he wanted to do. He was, for the first time in his life, well and truly without purpose.

He was stuck on the ledge between the fog and the drop and he knew now that both of them were truly inescapable. What else was there that he could do?

When he came up with the answer, he wondered why it hadn’t occurred to him straight away.

He still didn’t think he believed in prophecy, but he decided he was a big believer in hedging his bets. 

Nick ran all the way back to his flat and pulled a pocketknife from a drawer in his bedroom, then set out for the B&B.

*

How many times in three days could everything turn upside down? Nick wondered as he walked. Apparently the answer was far more than he would have guessed.

But something was different this time.

He supposed he should have had reservations about ending vampirism for good after having spent the last several months of his life working toward quite the opposite goal, but as soon as he realized what had to be done he realized that, all that time, he had been wrong. Since the beginning, since bleeding on the floor of the jail in Liverpool, since seeing Rachel’s drained corpse in the bar, since being dragged as a witness to death after death until he finally became a willing participant, all Nick had wanted was a way out. For a time, he’d had it in Hal. After that, he’d had it in Hal’s memory, as Hal’s legacy. Since yesterday he’d had it in the vague possibility of a radically altered world in which he might be able to make himself a place.

But none of these, he now understood, had really been anything other than a distraction. He’d been distracting himself for almost sixty years, and it was only now that he’d run out of diversions that he realized what he’d really been meant for all along.

So he had no second thoughts as he walked up the street to Tom’s house, and he did not hesitate before knocking loudly on the door, and he did not wait long before he tried to open it by force.

Eventually it was opened by a young woman who it took him a moment to recognize, and when he did he was angry with himself for not paying attention to the fact that, when Alex died, there had been no door. That must have been how Hal had gotten out.

“Didn’t I kill you?” he said.

“Believe me,” she said, “I’m as surprised that we’re having this conversation as you are.”

Nick almost laughed. If he thought it would mean anything he would’ve apologized to her.

“Ask me in,” he said urgently, and Alex looked back into the house. The other ghost, Annie, must be inside. Protecting the baby.

“Ask me in!” he said, louder this time.

Alex moved away from the door. She left it open.

Nick stared at the threshold for a moment, then sighed.

Go big or go home, he thought to himself, and then wished he had never met that bald idiot Golda brought with her, because now every time he had conjured up such a phrase he felt like he sounded like him.

Maybe he wouldn’t have to worry about it for much longer, he thought as he raised his hand toward the door.

As soon as his fingers crossed the threshold his skin began to burn.

He could not resist the urge to pull his hand back. The first time. 

Knowing now what to expect, he reached out again, this time with both hands.

He had third-degree burns within seconds of being in the house. The pain was beyond anything he had ever experienced, but the visual was perhaps even more shocking. His skin went black everywhere it was within the domain that he had not been given permission to enter. He pressed forward anyway.

He did not stop or pull back again, but he could not keep himself from screaming.

He could not hold himself upright, so he began to crawl across the floor. He could feel skin falling away from his body as he dragged it across the room, hoping now only that he would make it to the baby in time.

When he reached the couch, layers upon layers of his skin were barely hanging on. He felt his hair burning off. With a Herculean effort, he used his arms to raise himself up against the couch and see the baby on the other side.

“I don’t really know what I’m talking about here,” Alex said, “but apparently the baby needs to stay alive for the vampires to do their thing. So you hurt her, and you will get struck by lightning, or fall down a well, or something.”

“I know,” Nick said, and was shocked by the hoarse drawl that emanated from his singed vocal chords.

“Right,” Alex said, and then, a moment later, “What?”

With a tremendous effort, Nick said, “The baby dies, the vampires die. That’s why I’m here. I tried to help, but you wouldn’t even let me explain.”

Nick pulled the knife from his back pocket and extended the blade.

“I always knew I’d make history,” he said, and in the same instant as he wondered if he wanted a sarcastic death he realized it was probably, at this point, the only appropriate kind.

“Snow won’t forget me now,” he continued. “You know, I should say something. I mean I’m signing the death warrant for my entire species. I should mark the occasion somehow.”

Alex watched in horror. Annie would not look. It’s fine, he wanted to tell her. I understand. Maybe better than you realize.

He wished he thought she would believe him if he said this out loud.

Nick looked down at the baby and tried to feel happy or sad or guilty or troubled by what he was about to do. He could not. All he felt as he raised the blade over her tiny form was an intense certainty that for the first time since he became a vampire he was doing the right thing.

He heard a sound behind him, and even if he had time to wonder what it was he would not have had to. Somehow, he knew.

As the stake entered his heart, just before he fell to ash, in the seconds of feeling he had left, he experienced several emotions in quick succession. He was aware first of his failure, and then of the fact that he hardly cared about it. He experienced a sharp pang of regret for other things instead, for the not-life that flashed before his eyes as he realized it was about to end.

There’s no other afterlife for you, he thought as he fell to the floor, and the voice in his brain that was his own said, good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been obsessed with Nick Cutler for years and this is what finally came out of that. Thanks for your time.
> 
> I'm not around too much these days, but I am (unsurprisingly) nickcutler on tumblr, if you want to find me there.


End file.
